Trail of Feathers Read Online Free PDF Page A

Titicaca, the couple roamed the Andean wilderness in search of a place in which to construct a great capital. When they arrived where Cusco now stands, Manco Capac thrust his staff into the soil to test its fertility. The rod sank deep, verifying the land’s richness. So he told Mama Ocllo to bury a magic pip in the earth. From that seed, Cusco grew…
    Some say the city was built in the shape of a puma, others that it was designed to match the harmony of the Milky Way. As with Machu Picchu, we may never know the real secrets of its past. The Conquistadors reported to Madrid that they had set eyes on the most magnificent treasure in the New World. They were not speaking of the fine buildings, but of the gold which lay within them.
    Every ounce of that intoxicating metal was turned into ingots for the voyage back to Spain. Sacrificial urns, idols and plates, crowns, exquisite brooches, buckles, and
tumi
, sacrificial daggers, were melted down and shipped away. Ironically, Peru has once again become the centre of a world gold rush. Multinationals have flooded in, hiring local labourers for a pittance, in the dangerous business of extracting the ore. Hundreds of mines have sprouted up across the Peruvian Andes. But little has changed in the five hundred years since the first Conquistadors arrived in search of El Dorado. The gold mines are still being worked by
garimpeiros
, local miners, for foreign masters, their precious bounty being shipped abroad as before.
    Recently scholars have begun to realise that, while popular with the Incas, gold was never given pride of place. The Incas regarded textiles as far more important. When they first arrived in Peru, the Spanish were presented by the Incas with spans of lavish llama-fibre cloth. Considering the gesture to be nothing short of raillery, the Spaniards began a full-scale invasion, fuelled by insatiable greed.
    After carving their way across Peru, the Conquistadors found themselves face to face with the Inca, Atahualpa. Covered by sheets of gold, and robed in blue livery, he was borne forward on a litter carried by eighty men. The young Emperor’s head was weighted down by a golden crown; a collar of enormous emeralds choked his neck; his face was shrouded by a long fringe of wool, his ears hidden by disks of virgin gold.
    Atahualpa was wrenched from the litter and thrown into a cell, and the slaughter went on. Like his people, he couldn’t understand the conquerors’ fixation. The Incas assumed the Spanish either ate gold or used it in some bizarre medicinal preparation. According to the popular tale, Atahualpa marked a line high on his cell’s wall, offering to fill the room to that mark with gold in exchange for his freedom. The chamber, eighty-eight cubic meters in size, would be filled once with gold, and twice with silver.
    The entire empire was mobilised to ferry llama-loads of gold from all corners of the realm. While his people sacrificed their assets to free their sovereign, Atahualpa remained locked up. The prison guards were said to be amazed by the richness of his costume, which included macaw-feathered robes, and an unusual bat-hair cape.
    At last almost six thousand kilos of gold and twice that of silver were accumulated and handed over. The Inca braced himself for freedom, but the Spanish general, Francisco Pizzaro, had other ideas. Perhaps sensing an Incan uprising, Pizzaro accused Atahualpa of treason, the penalty of which was to be burned at the stake. The sentence was later changed to strangulation. When he was garrotted outside his prison cell in Cajamarca, many of the Inca’s wives and sisters were said to have hanged themselves so as to accompany his spirit into the afterlife.
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    Plaza de Armas, Cusco’s central square, was once the point at which over twenty-five thousand miles of Incan roads converged. Before the arrival of the Conquistadors, it was known as
Tahuantinsuyu
, The Four Quarters of the Earth, and was laid with soil from the distant