December 15, 2002

It is impossible not to be impressed by the spectacular ruins of Machu-Picchu. Their setting is quite breathtaking, occupying a saddle of land which falls away precipitately for thousands of feet on either side. All around are jagged mountain ranges and peaks of amazing grandeur. And to think that this ancient Inca settlement remained undiscovered until 1911 when an American called Hiram Bingham stumbled across it buried in a tropical jungle.

The Spanish when they marauded their way through South America in the sixteenth century had failed to find it. And even now with all the best archaeological brains at work nobody quite knows what exactly Machu-Picchu was.

Its origins date from around 1450 and it was abandoned before the Spanish arrived seventy years later. There is a small sun temple, plenty of houses, lots of female skeletons, moon and mountain worshipping alters, sacrificial areas, terraces and squares all laid out to a well designed plan. But it does not add up to a town, a fortress or even a religious site.

Now Oscar Medina Zevallos has written a novel around his belief that Machu-Picchu was a big sanitarium for top Incas to recover from diseases brought in by Westerners. The female skeletons were those of the nurses.

I was lucky enough to meet Zevallos when I was visiting Machu-Picchu recently. His fractured English and my non-existent Spanish made verbal communication almost impossible but by other means he showed his dedicated enthusiasm and the effortless charm of the older man who has given his life-long intellectual commitment to a well nigh hopeless cause, that of the Quechua people.

Of course staying in nearby Cusco had given me a first inkling that the Quechua Indian people and culture were struggling valiantly against a harsh and uncomprehending centralized Peruvian government.

Zevallos has put in novel form the aching desire of all oppressed minorities to run their own affairs. He has written a rip roaring account of an investigative journalist looking innocently enough at first at the annual Inti Raymi in Cusco. This was set up in 1944 by some intellectuals to resuscitate ancient Incan ceremonies. Nowadays as well as being of great cultural value to the Quechua community, it is a huge tourist attraction.

Zevallos’s journalist stumbles (much as Hiram Bingham did) on an underground city where a group of Incas have lived secretly for 500 years since the Spanish supposedly vanquished them. They are well organized, fully dedicated and have kept all their traditions and customs intact as well as keeping up with the latest technologies in the world outside. They are determined to oust the corrupt and hopeless Peruvian government and not only that to rid the entire world of its grievous and degrading capitalist ways. They want to ‘reincarnate’, as Zevallos says, the world.

What makes this book fascinating is the description of Incan culture and how it reached ‘exquisite and subtle sensibilities at the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual level’. It was so superior to that of the Spanish and indeed all societies that the Spanish had no option but to obliterate it completely. This feeling that the past is better than the corrupt, hopeless present is quite often referred to by politicians but it rarely grabs a novelist’s imagination.

However in this book the author has so successfully called up a previous idyllic past that the reader is more than convinced that an Incan future is what we should all strive for!

The enigma of Machu-Picchu
By Patricia Twig and Oscar Jadue
Reuna, Canada 239, Providence, Santiago
Website: www.reuna.cl
106pp. Price not stated

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