Page 59 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

haired men’ who had lived thousands of years earlier.
13
One legend described Viracocha as being accompanied by ‘messengers’
of two kinds, ‘faithful soldiers’ (huaminca) and ‘shining ones’ (hayhuay-
panti). Their role was to carry their lord’s message ‘to every part of the
world’.
14
Elsewhere there were phrases such as: ‘Con Ticci returned ... with a
number of attendants’; ‘Con Ticci then summoned his followers, who
were called viracocha’; ‘Con Ticci commanded all but two of the viracocha
to go east ...’ ; ‘There came forth from a lake a Lord named Con Ticci
15
Viracocha bringing with him a certain number of people ...’ ; ‘Thus those
16
viracochas went off to the various districts which Viracocha had indicated
for them ...’.
17

The work of demons?

The ancient citadel of Sacsayhuaman lies just north of Cuzco. We reached
it late one afternoon under a sky almost occluded by heavy clouds of
tarnished silver. A cold grey breeze was blowing across the high-altitude
tundra as I clambered up stairways, through lintelled stone gates built for
giants, and walked along the mammoth rows of zig-zag walls.
I craned my neck and looked up at a big granite boulder that my route
now passed under. Twelve feet high, seven feet across, and weighing
considerably more than 100 tons, it was a work of man, not nature. It had
been cut and shaped into a symphonic harmony of angles, manipulated
with apparent ease (as though it were made of wax or putty) and stood
on its end in a wall of other huge and problematic polygonal blocks,
some of them positioned above it, some below it, some to each side, and
all in perfectly balanced and well-ordered juxtaposition.
Since one of these astonishing pieces of carefully hewn stone had a
height of twenty-eight feet and was calculated to weigh 361 tons
18
(roughly the equivalent of five hundred family-sized automobiles), it
seemed to me that a number of fundamental questions were crying out
for answers.
How had the Incas, or their predecessors, been able to work stone on
such a gargantuan scale? How had they cut and shaped these Cyclopean
boulders so precisely? How had they transported them tens of miles from

13 Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Harper & Brothers, New York,
1882, p. 394.
14 From the 'Relacion anonyma de los costumbres antiguos de los naturales del Piru',
reported in The Facts on File Encyclopaedia ..., p. 657.
15 Pears Encyclopaedia of Myths and Legends: Oceania, Australia and the Americas, (ed.
Sheila Savill), Pelham Books, London, 1978, pp. 179-80.
South American Mythology, p. 76.
16
17 Ibid.
18 The Conquest of the Incas, p. 191.

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