Coin by Ronil Caine

Author:Ronil Caine [Caine, Ronil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2017-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

9

Guayasamin arrived at the hotel in a cab a few minutes before sunrise. They went to the airport together and took a small Bombardier with seventy-eight passengers to Jauja. Luis told Gua they would not crash because nothing particularly lucky happened to him in the past few days. Then he remembered the catastrophe he survived two days earlier and wondered if it counted as such, but then he convinced himself that was not how the coin worked.

The plane did not crash: it landed softly on the tarmac of the Francisco Carle airport. They rented an SUV in Jauja and headed out into the depths of the Andes. They carried spare cans of gasoline and food in the back of the car.

Guayasamin disclosed interesting details about the Incas as they drove, and Luis listened intently. Gua told him that several tribes still lived in the mountains, practically the same way they did in the 15th-16th centuries. The Incas were always good at passing on information, so if only one such temple survived, or if there was someone who knew about this cabal, they would find out. He told Luis that according to the Inca worldview, man had a duty to protect nature and keep up mutual respect.

The roads were uneven. As they went through an ever-changing countryside, the bleak rocks gave way to flourishing plant life and the dry gravel roads were replaced by a dirt track. Once, they took a rope ferry across a river, another time they had to haul the mired SUV across a muddy spot with their windlass. It was hot and Luis’s shirt was dripping with sweat; later, it was caked with dust, while his boots and his trousers were covered in mud. He looked like an archaeologist excavating at a dig.

Guayasamin’s raspy, but comfortable voice kept telling him about the Incas, and how their empire spanned three thousand miles in it's heyday. Their cities were connected by well-paved roads and hanging bridges that made even the Spanish conquerors stare. They carved terraces into the hillside to have arable land and dug canals to water them, and did all that without inventing the wheel. They built their empire with their hands and their animals and their buildings still survived to modern times. Neither rain, wind, nor even earthquakes could destroy them.

After this he told Luis about their emperors, whom they believed to be the children of the Sun; and the hosts of protective spirits who guarded them, their totems and the huacas which marked the extraordinary in this world, such as an oddly shaped tree, a cave, a meadow.

Luis asked Gua about human sacrifices, but his guide told him that was more typical of the Aztecs and the Mayas; the Incas did not practice such sacrifices, or only did very rarely and on a voluntary basis. This was not what Luis had heard, but he did not know too much about the Incas.

The road forked off into the forest and Guayasamin left the main route. This

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