Gold Read Online Free PDF

which were [Montezuma’s] own exclusive possessions: his personal belongings,all of which were precious: necklaces with thick stones, arm bands of quetzal feathers, bracelets of gold, golden bands with shells for the knees, ankle bracelets with little gold bells, and the royal crowns and all the royal attire, without number, everything that belonged to him and was reserved to him only.
    The news of such riches intoxicated Spanish adventurers, including an illiterate desperado named Francisco Pizarro.He was the bastard son of a Spanish colonel and an impoverished rural woman. His mother, probably a maid, abandoned him on the steps of a church. Raised by relatives, he was a distant cousin of Cortés. In 1513 he accompanied the explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa to the Pacific. Six years later he betrayed his patron, arresting Balboa as he rode to a meeting with his enemy, a rival who accused him of crimes against the king. Balboa was beheaded, protesting his innocence to the end. Pizarro was rewarded with Panama City, which he ran until 1523. The next year he made his first expedition in search of the great civilization rumored to exist to the south. Two years later, he made his second. For demonic speed and horror, few stories can match what happened next, as Pizarro and his tiny band rode into the mountain fastness. It was the lost kingdom of a fairy tale—fantastic, remote, strange, beautiful, and rich. Pizarro was its nemesis, the herald of a greed that his victims could not even comprehend. With Pizarro, a whole continent’s appetite for gold rode into the Andes.
    T HE NAME I NCA REFERS TO both the people and the leader of the empire of Peru. Inca expansion from the valley of Cuzco beganabout 1438, when a talented war leader named Pachacuti Yupanqui conquered his neighbors. He was the first Inca to extend his power beyond Cuzco. Pachacuti was the builder of Machu Picchu, the city that hangs on a mountain ridge forty-three miles northwest of Cuzco, and was his private estate. Pachacuti’s son, Tupac Yupanqui, continued the expansion, and by 1471 ruled an empire that extended through the Andes for 3,000 miles.
    The culture and appearance of the Andean people evolved through centuries of life in the mountains. They had large lungs and chests for breathing the thin air of the high altitudes. Their steeply terraced fields blazed with lupines, a food crop. Aqueducts carried water to the cultivated land. The Incas had no money.They worked as part of a system of reciprocal duty marked by celebrations that included getting drunk on chicha beer. Wealth lay in the control of labor, the ownership of land, and the state llama herds. The empire was isolated on one side by the planet’s greatest ocean and on the other by its biggest forest. In the south there was only desert and to the north they had conquered everyone. The Inca’s generals could marshal hundreds of thousands of fighting men.They could move their armies with amazing swiftness along 14,000 miles of roads that astonished the first Europeans to see them.“Such magnificent roads could be seen nowhere in Christendom in country as rough as this,” wrote Hernando Pizarro, the conqueror’s brother. Another Spaniard described a terrifying climb up a “stupendous mountainside. Looking at it from below, it seemed impossible for birds to scale it by flying through the air, let alone men on horseback climbing by land. But the road was made less exhausting by climbing in zigzags.” The main royal road followed the Andes from Colombia to Chile. A coastal highway paralleled the Pacific, and connecting roads joined the two routes.
    Important constructions such as Sacsayhuaman, the immensefortress above Cuzco, used monolithic stones fitted together with impenetrable skill. They had textiles and ceramics and bronze metallurgy, precious feathers, silver, and rare stones. They mined gold and made gold ornaments.Their surgeons could drill holes