The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  Tour groups, speaking every language in the world, criss-cross the place like spiders weaving a giant web. Stubbing out their duty-free cigarettes underfoot, rubbing sun-cream into their wrinkles, troupe after troupe of khaki-clothed tourists hustles forward, desperate to get their money’s worth in this, the greatest archaeological theme park on earth.

  *

  On the western edge of Machu Picchu, we came across a group of seven East Europeans, clustered around a curiously-shaped granite block. The tourists, dressed in matching lilac robes, were barefoot, except for one woman who was wearing purple moonboots. They were chanting some kind of invocation. Patricia frowned, then shook her head woefully.

  “They are always doing this,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Those purple people. They come from Poland and think they are Incas. They come to take power from the Intihuatana, the Sacred Stone.”

  We watched as the Poles, their palms pressed against the granite surface and their eyes tightly closed, sapped the rock’s energy.

  “What’s so sacred about that stone?”

  “The Incas used to tie the sun to it,” said Patricia. “It proved their power over nature. When the Spanish found those special stones, they broke them up. I wish this one could be broken,” she said, her voice rasping with anger, “then maybe the Polish people would go away.”

  Soon after, Patricia’s wish was granted. The sacred stone was crushed to bits during the filming of a beer commercial.

  Without wasting time Patricia led me from the holy rock, down through the terraced ruins, pointing out the principal buildings along the way.

  Since Bingham, every generation has dreamed up new theories to explain the ruined city. Experts have claimed it was a fortress, a private hacienda, a nunnery, centre of learning or religion, even an observatory.

  “Look at this place,” Patricia said, sweeping her arm in an arc over a bluff of rocks, “this is called the Temple of the Condor.”

  I entered the shrine.

  “To me it does look like a temple dedicated to birds,” said Patricia. “See here, how the wings of the condor are represented by the rock. And here, how the image of a condor has been carved from a piece of granite.”

  The guide wiped her neck with her hand. “But has it got anything to do with birds at all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bingham thought it was the prison, where convicts were chained up or killed,” she said. “Others have said it’s a princess’s tomb, a kitchen, or a place where maize was stored.”

  I stepped out of the way as a river of retired Israelis flooded in. Before we knew it they were upon us. We held our ground. The Israeli leader, waving a pink flag – embroidered with the legend Moses Basket Tours – was a force to be reckoned with. He spewed out a couple of lines about the temple, clapped his hands signaling for photography to begin, glared at the Bengalis; clapped again, and led the way to the Temple of the Rainbow.

  Every three minutes another wave of white-skinned, blue-rinsed retirees splashed in, and swirled around us. Between the waves, I made a hurried inspection of the sanctuary. The form of the condor was blatantly obvious, lying outstretched on the floor, its wings writhing behind, and its beak lurching ahead. This was no prison block or princess’s tomb, but quite obviously a shrine dedicated to flight.

  Patricia pointed out the groove in the bird’s ruff, where sacrificial llama blood might once have run. A rush of energy gripped me as the next swell of Israelis surged into the cove. Surely this, the Temple of the Condor, was connected to the Birdmen?

  Patricia noticed my particular interest in this shrine.

  “Why are you so interested in birds?” she asked, scrunching her cheeks into a smile.

  “I have heard that the Incas glided over the jungles,” I said.

  “They may have done so,” Patricia said. “But you don’t understand.”

  “Understand, what?”

  “You are thinking of the flight itself, which is meaningless,” she said. “And, you’re missing the real question.”

  I paused, as another wave of tourists hurled themselves into the temple. A moment later they were gone.

  “What is the real meaning, the real question?”

  Patricia ran her fingers across the stylized stone wing of the condor.

  “Whether the Incas flew or not is irrelevant,” she said. “Instead, you must ask why they wanted to fly.”

  Reflecting on Patricia’s words, I recalled that, on a trip to Mexico, I had once come across a fiesta in the small Yucatan town of Ticul. The highlight of the festival was a ceremony, called Volador. It’s said to have been started by the Aztecs. Three men, guised as birds, with papier-maché beaks and feathered robes, leapt off a miniature platform at the top of a towering pole. Each had a cord tied to his ankles, which had been wound around the pole. As the men vaulted from the platform, they swung round and round, unwinding as they flew.

  A Mexican friend told me that Volador represented freedom, and the devotion of man to God. For years I had puzzled over this. But it helped me to understand why the Incas might have wanted to fly. It wasn’t about getting from A to B. It was about something far more fundamental, far more spectacular.

  The Incas could have had no need to use flight as a means of transport. Such a thing would surely have trivialized what they considered to be a sacred medium. Yet they must have had good reason for yearning to glide, to soar free in the air. Perhaps, like the condor, the Incan Birdmen were messengers to the Gods.

  Two hours later I was perched up on the summit of Huayna Picchu, the sugar loaf peak which overlooks the ancient city. The climb is strenuous, especially when you have a bout of the runs. Crawling on my hands and knees up the sheer faces of stone, I began to wish that I’d stayed with Patricia. I had left her in the café down below, with a plate of roasted guinea pig.

  Staring out across the valley, down to the Urubamba River, was invigorating beyond words. The light was now a syrupy yellow, bright yet not harsh. A chill wind ripped through my hair, whistling between the crags. I yelled at the top of my voice. But no one heard me. Then, like a cat stuck in a tree, I peeped down at the ruins. The lack of safety devices was unnerving, but at the same time exhilarating. One slip of the heel and Huayna Picchu would have embraced another victim.

  The rush of the wind was telling me to thrust away from the rock and jump.

  “You will fly! You will fly!” it called.

  “But I have no wings. It’ll be suicide.”

  “Make a canopy,” urged the wind. “With a sail streaming above you, glide down to Earth.”

  I closed my eyes and sensed the current of air on my face. Then I breathed in deeply.

  “Trust me, and I will protect you... I will hold you as you fly.”

  I opened my eyes a crack, and began to understand the significance of Machu Picchu. Stretching out in symmetrical flanks, on east and west, the ruins were arranged as wings. Once I saw them, I couldn’t get them out of my mind. They gleamed up at me, glinting in the yellow light.

  Machu Picchu was laid out in the shape of a condor.

  I would have slithered my way back down to the café much sooner. But a refined-looking Peruvian man was watching me.

  “It’s a condor!” I shouted. “Machu Picchu’s a gigantic condor!”

  The man was dressed in a sheepskin coat, with the flaps of a woolen hat pulled down snugly over his ears. His nose was streaming, and his cheeks were scarlet. In his hands was a tin, and in it were coca leaves.

  “The condor is the messenger,” he said in English, offering me some of the leaves.

  “Whose messenger?”

  Resting the tin on his knee, the man washed his hands over his face.

  “The condor links us to heaven,” he said. “Just as it did the Incas. It is the bridge, the bridge between man and God.”

  “Could the Incas glide like condors?”

  The man twisted the corners of his mouth into a smile. />
  “We can all fly,” he said.

  “All of us?”

  The man nodded.

  “Si, all of us.”

  He paused, to regard me sideways on.

  “Todos tenemos alas, we all have wings,” he said, “but we have forgotten how to use them.”

  FOUR

  Cusco

  Long ago, when the Incan empire was no more than a twinkle in the Creator’s eye, the land was dim and untamed. Manco Capac, the son of the sun, and Mama Ocllo, the moon’s daughter, set off to dispel the darkness. Emerging from the still waters of Lake 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 laborers 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 realize 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-fiber cloth. Considering the gesture to be nothing short of raillery, the Spaniards began a full-scale invasion, fueled 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 mobilized 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 twelve thousand pounds 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.

  *

  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 reaches of the empire. It has borne witness to battles, executions, mutinies and plagues, to great banquets, coronations and sacrificial rites. These days, virtually every central plaza in Peru is known as Plaza de Armas, in honor of those who died in the 1879 war with Chile.

  From the moment I set eyes on that great square, something stirred inside me. Along with the incessant stream of travelers, I realized at once that Cusco was different. Like them, I stopped dead in my tracks, put a hand to my mouth, and held my breath. It was as if I had been let into an extraordinary secret.

  Long shadows of the winter afternoon veiled the maze of terracotta-roofs. Cobbled passageways with sheer stone sides led off to the east and the west. Arched doorways hinted at the courtyards which lay behind. Whitewashed walls trimmed in bougainvillea dazzled me as I explored the back-streets of what must be the most enchanting city on the Latin continent.

  At almost eleven thousand feet, the vanilla-scented air was frosty with cold. A gang of street-vendors bustled forward, wrapped up in their winter woolies, tilted bowlers pulled down tight. Every Cusquenian seemed to be clutching a shallow basket of goods; hand-woven Alpaca gloves, ponchos and raspy woolen socks; quenas, panpipes, under-ripe lemons, jars of honey and Inca brand cigarettes. For every tray of merchandize there were ten newly-arrived tourists with a little money to spend.

  Cusco is a city of bargains. The South American equivalent of Kathmandu, it’s saturated with impoverished adventurers who refuse to leave. Like me, they know that such precious destinations are hard to come by. Stroll down narrow alleys off the main square, and you find rows of shops, selling the effects of the desperate. Half-empty bottles of pink Pepto-Bismol, goose-down sleeping bags, waterproof matches, limp loo paper and tubs or Nivea sun-cream.

  It was at the back of one such shop, which doubled as a café, beneath a rousing portrait of Ché Guevara, that I met Sven.

  He watched me carefully as I poked about in a display barrel of pawned accessories. I examined the blade of an Opinel pocket-knife, checked the sell-by-date on a slab of Kendal mint cake, flicked through a dog-eared, damaged copy of West with the Night.

  “Do you play chess?” he asked with a lisp.

  “Badly.”

  Before I could stop him, the hunched figure had pulled a board and pieces from his grubby satchel and laid them out. Male pattern baldness had robbed his head of hair, except for a long tuft at the front. His complexion was fair, his eyes an imperial blue, and his forehead was severed by lines. A much-darned gray pullover rolled up to his chin like an orthopaedic neck-brace.

  He thrust out a square hand.

  “Sven,” he said, “from Bratislava.”

  I took a seat in the window alcove, adjacent.

  “What shall we play for?” he asked.

  “I have no chance of winning, I’m hopeless at chess.”

  He pulled a yellow Sony Walkman from his satchel and placed it beside the board.

  “You can have it if you win,” he said.

  My eyes widened with greed.

  “What happens if I lose?”

  Sven stretched over and tugged at my scarf.

  “Wool?”

  “Alpaca,” I replied.

  The game lasted six moves. As my king fell on his sword, the Slovak reached over, unwound my scarf, and twirled it around his own neck.

  “It’s quite nice,” he said.

  “I should hope so, it was a birthday present from my mother.”

  Sven swept back the tuft of liquorice hair.

  “I have the advantage,” he said softly. “I assume you’ve never been banged up in a Slovak prison.”

  The chess-player wouldn’t say why he had done seven years in a high-security jail. But
he did reveal, over a cup of mate de coca, that his friends called him Walkman. He was walking around the world in the name of peace and poetry.

  “The countries which pass beneath my feet,” he mumbled, staring out the window. “They are the future. Forget Europe, it’s finished.”

  “Which is your favorite place?”

  The Slovak bent down to loosen his bootlaces.

  “How can a father choose between his children?” he asked. “Macedonia was rough like the surface of the moon; Jordan was tender as a baby’s cry; Egypt smelled of jasmine, and the Sudan...” Sven paused to sip his mate. “The Sudan,” he said, “was silent as a prophet’s grave.”

  Round the corner from the pawn-shop, Señor Pedro Valentine was holding up a pair of my underpants, stretched out between his arthritic thumbs. Indicating the superior quality of the cloth, to a shop full of female customers, he pouted like a Milanese gigolo.

  “That’s the finest cotton I’ve seen in thirty years of laundering,” he said. “I bet they hold your merchandize just right.”

  Half a dozen crones cackled. I confirmed that the underpants had served me well, especially during the hazardous days on the Inca Trail.

  Once the elderly women had left, Señor Valentine made me a business proposition. He said that if, on my return, I exported him a container of English underpants he’d sell them in Cusco. He could muster a sales force of schoolboys. We’d be sure to make a fortune. The men of Cusco, he said, were sick to the back teeth of abrasive local underwear.

  Señor Valentine handed me a stack of laundered clothes. Then he picked out a pair of barberry-red knickers and pressed them to his nostrils as if they were a rose.

  “Huele, have a sniff,” he said conspiratorially, “a German girl just brought them in, she was muy bonita, very pretty.”