CUZCO/ MACCHU PICHU

We only have an afternoon in Cuzco on our return from Ollantytambo. It's hot and for the first time we're stuck with our rucksacks. There's also a degree of exhaustion setting in. Travelling is hard work. Anyone who says any different has too much money. Days of sleeping on buses, climbing hills, waking early and wearing unwashed clothes, start to mount up.

We walk down the Avenida del Sol and find a bench in front of the Templo del Sol. C sketches. I dig out Garcilaso, bought yesterday, and start to read. Sure enough, I come to the passage where he talks about the Templo del Sol itself. He talks about having seen three of the Templo's five primary halls in his youth. Two were already destroyed. The Templo's remarkable external Incan wall, which seems to hold up the church constructed by the Spanish on top of it, is black and ageless. Once again, it looks like the stepbrother to Kubrick's space-plinth in 2001. It also seems to mock everything else constructed around it. It's not about size, it's about perfection. The wall seems to taunt its conquerers culture with its flawlessness. Something the white men can only dream of achieving.

After lunch we join the throng and go inside, hiring a guide. Flocks of tourists lead by guides speaking every language under the sun buzz around us. The guide points out the way in which the temple appears to have been constructed to capture the light of the various solstices. The careful orientation of the chambers. The hamfisted intervention of the Dominicans, who only let the public in to see the Temple they annexed twenty years ago. As though they might have been scared of its effect on the Cuzcan citizens. Inciting them to reclaim their former glories.

The guide has a laconic attitude. He stresses that no matter how much anyone seeks to interpret the things they find in the Templo - sacrificial stones, for example - no-one really knows what any of these rooms represented or were used for. Garcilaso talks of rooms dedicated to the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Rainbow and one for the priests. But no-one knows which is which. And even his account is no more than something passed down, a generation later. Underneath the Templo are, apparently, tunnels, linking to the fortress of Sacsayhuaman on the edge of town. Tunnels which have since been bricked up. Once upon a time three locals got lost in the tunnels. One emerged three weeks later with a Corncob made of gold. The other two were never seen again.

The Incas destroyed most of their city to stop the Spaniards getting their hands on it. What they didn't destroy, the Spaniards did. One wonders whether, in his old age in Cordoba, the old Inca saw the connection between what his father's line had done in the Inca's Templo del Sol and what they the Spanish had done in the grand Mesquite in Cordoba. Both of them desecrated in the name of God. Just as now we take old churches and convert them into flats in the name of Mammon. Garcilaso is more likely to have visited the Alhambra than Machu Picchu. So the comparison between these two idyllic, heavenly redoubts was one he would never have been able to make. But the sound of water, trickling and gurgling through the Inca cities is the same sound loved so much by the Moors, forever embroidering their palaces with its freshness, just like his ancestors. When he was fighting the Moors, did he think of the Inca's fate?

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