Page 62 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 7

Were There Giants Then?

Just after six in the morning the little train jerked into motion and began
its slow climb up the steep sides of the valley of Cuzco. The narrow-
gauge tracks were laid out in a series of Z shapes. We chugged along the
lower horizontal of the first Z, then shunted and went backwards up the
oblique, shunted again and went forward along the upper horizontal—
and so on, with numerous stops and starts, following a route that
eventually took us high above the ancient city. The Inca walls and colonial
palaces, the narrow streets, the cathedral of Santo Domingo squatting
atop the ruins of Viracocha’s temple, all looked spectral and surreal in
the pearl-grey light of a dawn sky. A fairy pattern of electric lamps still
decorated the streets, a thin mist seeped across the ground, and the
smoke of domestic fires rose from the chimneys over the tiled roofs of
countless small houses.
Eventually the train turned its back on Cuzco and we proceeded for a
while in a straight north-westerly direction towards our destination:
Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, some three hours and 130
kilometres away. I had intended to read, but lulled by the rocking motion
of the carriage, I dropped off to sleep instead. Fifty minutes later I awoke
to find that we were passing through a painting. The foreground, brightly
sunlit, consisted of flat green meadows sprinkled with little patches of
thawing frost, distributed on either side of a stream across a long, wide
valley.
In the middle of my view, dotted with bushes, was a large field on which
a handful of black and white dairy cows grazed. Nearby was a scattered
settlement of houses outside which stood small, dark-skinned Quechua
Indians dressed in ponchos, balaclavas and colourful woollen hats. More
distant were slopes canopied in fir trees and exotic eucalyptus. My eye
followed the rising contours of a pair of high green mountains, which
then parted to reveal folded and even more lofty uplands. Beyond these
soared a far horizon surmounted by a jagged range of radiant and snowy
peaks.

Casting down the giants

It was with understandable reluctance that I turned at last to my reading.
I wanted to look more closely at some of the curious links I thought I had
identified connecting the sudden appearance of Viracocha to the deluge
legends of the Incas and other Andean peoples.

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