GARCILASO

Garcilaso de la Vega was the son of a conquistador and an Incan princess. At the age of 23 he left Peru for Spain and never returned. He fought against the Moors before retiring to Cordoba. One suspects he was aware of the ironies. He comes across as an intelligent man. In old age he began to write about his homeland and carried on writing until he died.

He is a pioneer. The first modern man. The original American. A man who belonged to both worlds and, as is the way of these things, neither. He also understood that the pen is mightier than the sword. Time after time he comments that the glory of the Incan world failed in only one regard. Its failure to devise a written language in which to recount its greatness.

His book deals in detail with the three hundred year history of the Incan Empire. He is shrewd enough to make an ironic comment on its origins, when the Sun deposited two children on the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca, who founded the Incan empire. He says of this tale: "I myself think that this first Inca...must have been a man of wisdom, prudence and intelligence, who well understood the simplicity of his peoples and who had astutely and shrewdly invented this fable about the Sun in order to make them obey him and follow the path of natural progress."

However, not only is this a history, it's also an anthropological account of Inca culture, which covers almost every aspect. Regarding the stonemasonry, he describes in detail something that most Spaniards for whom he was writing would never see. The highest form of Inca masonry is achieved without the use of any kind of mortar. Enormous stones are carefully assembled and bevelled so that the sheer weight or pressure of their assembly lends them a structural force (and physical beauty). It is a form of architecture the like of which never arose in Europe (unless one includes dry stone walls). Any guide in Peru will tell you about the remarkable knowledge of physics and geometry which is implicit in this stonemasonry. Adding that there must have been a way of passing this knowledge down from generation to generation, as indeed there must have been. The unfinished stones which populate every Incan site are testament to the fact that this was an architecture conceived on a glacial level. To be honed and worked over decades, perhaps centuries. At the heart of Macchu Pichu is what our guide referred to as 'the office': the place where unfinished stones, or stones whose destiny has yet to be decided, lie, eternally awaiting the return of the labourers who will convert them from works of nature into works of art.

Garcilaso quotes the words of a monk, recently returned from the New World. Who says that the only way he can rationalise the constructions he has seen (which would have been closer to the state of their original glory) was to say that they had been achieved with the help of "the Evil One."