Everyone loves to love The Incas. This includes their descendants and those of their close neighbors, the Quechua peoples. Quechua is one of the two official languages of Peru (along with Spanish). In the highlands, there is a certain look to the people. Quechua blood is strong here. But even our tour guide in Cuzco – gentle, erudite Marco with his necktie and umbrella, Spanish-looking and European educated (with a degree in anthropology) described an event as “good for the Spaniards, but bad for us.” Us. Although Marco and most of the people in Cuzco are of mixed blood (I asked), it’s very clear which side they identify with. I was fiercely glad about this.

Okay. So why do we all prefer the Incas to the Spaniards? On the surface of it, the answer is obvious. The Spaniards were illiterate, intolerant bullies who arrived with their superior weapons and their European diseases to decimate a civilized culture, and thought so little of it that they melted down the brilliant Inca artwork and crafted items in silver and gold for bullion to pay their armies. They enslaved the people. They not only forbade them to practice their religion, but also made them tear down their own temples (rather than which many of the Incas preferred to commit suicide). They obliterated their culture and never even knew what they had destroyed. We value that which has disappeared, especially since the little we know of it has beauty and wisdom.

But on the other hand. The Inca empire was less than a hundred years old when the Spaniards destroyed it. All the evidence indicates that the Incas did to other, earlier civilizations exactly what the Spaniards did to theirs – obliterated religious practices; destroyed whole towns as well as temples, sometimes demolishing them stone from stone; transported entire peoples into slave labor in remote regions. The Incas destroyed a pre-Columbian and relatively advanced civilization in Equador so thoroughly, dismantling entire cities stone from stone and relocating entire populations, that had the events not happened within the living memory of some of the people met by the Spaniards, we would have no record of it at all. Like the Spaniards, the Incas ultimately extended their empire too far and, overextended, helped bring about their own downfall.

I think the main thing one can say about the Incas as opposed to the Spaniards is that they took from the peoples they conquered arts and culture, not just material wealth. They were willing to learn. Much of the art of stone-building at Ollantaytambu and other Inca sites (such as Machu Picchu and Sacsayhuaman, among others) clearly came from the Tiahuanacu people, whom they conquered. The Incas forceably relocated the Tiahuanacu stonebuilders and others to Ollantaytambu, thereby solving two problems at once. The Tiahuanacu had not wanted to join the Inca empire (as had many other groups), and because they had fought against the Incas, they had to be subdued and punished. The Ollantaytambans had also fought rather than submitting, and since they were close to home, the Incas had to keep them under control. The Incas decided that a significant structure (Incas seemed to combine monument, fortress, and temple into one concept) was needed at Ollantaytambu, and the Tiahuanacu were the people to build it.

Ollantaytambu, Sacsayhuaman, and Machu Picchu were never finished. The Inca empire lasted less than a hundred years and had only four emperors before the Spanish came. Building projects involving thousands of people over fifty years ground to a sudden halt when the smallpox swept down, ahead of the Spaniards, followed shortly by civil war. By the time the Spaniards themselves arrived, it was already over.

The other factor that keeps the Incas so alive in our hearts and spirits is the interplay of light and heaviness. It’s hard to comprehend a culture that had such a love of stone and such a mastery of its workmanship, while at the same time worshipping the sun. Yet only the dominance of both of these factors can explain the magic of the structures we find. Machu Picchu is magnificent – but it is not unique (except in how well preserved and how [relatively] accessible it is). The Incas built on the shoulders of the mountains, where they could mark and celebrate the rising and setting of the sun. Watching the sun set or rise over Machu Picchu shows clearly how inconceivable it is the Incas would have built in the dark river valleys, or on the unsubtle, exposed peaks. At the same time they built of the material of the mountains, fitting and polishing each unique stone, rejoicing in the size and power of the rocks, and working their structures right into and around the natural stone formations.

One more thing. Quechua (and perhaps even specifically Inca) culture is far from vanished in Peru. Our deeply Christian guide at the convent in Arequipa spoke not only of Christ as Love, but also of the power of the earth as manifested in certain root vegetables (long, phallic ones). The condor representing heaven, the puma representing the earth, and the serpent representing the world below the earth are all carved into the stone façade of a church on the main square in Arequipa. One of the chapels of the cathedral in Cuzco, beautifully carved of native wood, has deliciously fertile naked women carved into every armrest of every seat. Tour guides point out these features proudly. We are Catholic, they seem to be saying, but in our own way and on our own terms. The computer geek who copied my camera’s full flash card to CDROM in Cuzco paused to admire a photo of a condor in flight. Condors, we were told more than once, are the guides of the soul from this life to the next. Our guide in the Sacred Valley carried an Inca cross, the three-stepped cross representing the worlds below, on, and above the earth, and the four directions of the Inca roads out of Cuzco, the navel of the world, to all the world’s quarters. (I love this elegant symbol of the entire universe, and now have one of my own, with a jewel representing Cuzco, which means navel in Quechua, in the center.)