Page 54 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

with sheets of gold and a marvellous orchard of golden trees.
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Earthquakes in 1650 and again in 1950 had largely demolished the
Spanish cathedral of Santo Domingo which stood on the site of the
temple of Viracocha, and it had been necessary to rebuild it on both
occasions. Its Inca foundations and lower walls survived these natural
disasters intact, thanks to their characteristic design which made use of
an elegant system of interlocking polygonal blocks. These blocks, and the
general layout of the place, were almost all that was now left of the
original structure, apart from an octagonal grey stone platform at the
centre of the vast rectangular courtyard which had once been covered
with 55 kilograms of solid gold. On either side of the courtyard were
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ante-chambers, also from the Inca temple, with refined architectural
features such as walls that tapered upwards and beautifully-carved niches
hewn out of single pieces of granite.
We took a walk through the narrow, cobbled streets of Cuzco. Looking
around, I realized it was not just the cathedral that reflected Spanish
imposition on top of an earlier culture: the whole town was slightly
schizophrenic. Spacious, balconied, pastel-shaded colonial homes and
palaces towered above me but almost all of them stood on Inca
foundations or incorporated complete Inca structures of the same
beautiful polygonal architecture used in the Coricancha. In one alleyway,
known as Hatunrumiyoc, I paused to examine an intricate jigsaw puzzle
of a wall made of countless drystone blocks all perfectly fitted together,
all of different sizes and shapes, interlocking in a bewildering array of
angles. The carving of the individual blocks, and their arrangement into
so complicated a structure could only have been achieved by master
craftsmen possessed of very high levels of skill, with untold centuries of
architectural experimentation behind them. On one block I counted
twelve angles and sides in a single plane, and I could not slip even the
edge of a piece of thin paper into the joints that connected it to the
surrounding blocks.

The bearded stranger

It seemed that in the early sixteenth century, before the Spanish began to
demolish Peruvian culture in earnest, an idol of Viracocha had stood in
the Holy of Holies of the Coricancha. According to a contemporary text,
the Relacion anonyma de los costumbres antiguos de los naturales del
Piru, this idol took the form of a marble statue of the god—a statue
described ‘as to the hair, complexion, features, raiment and sandals, just

Tan. Terumah, XI; also, with slight variations, Yoma 39b. Cited in The Jewish
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Encyclopaedia, Funk and Wagnell, New York, 1925, vol. II, p. 105.
9 Peru, p. 182.

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