Incas are Peruvians

  by Rosemary Kelham

  I have wanted to meet the Incas ever since I was in the Infant school. I was already reading fluently when I started school at the age of four and was fortunate to have a teacher, Miss Fazey, who brought me material from her own library to maintain my love of books and extend the range of my reading. That was my first meeting with the Incas, although for a while they were confused with Hiawatha who occurred in the same volume and was coloured in with the same set of crayons.

  The second meeting happened last year when, at long last, I took the journey to Peru.  I thought I knew all about these people by then but no amount of reading prepares you for your encounter with these lovely kind, patient and gentle people with their quiet humour and sense of fun. Their life, whether as plainsmen or High Andeans is hard and moments of relaxation are scarce. The two different physical environments have produced two different physical types. The plainsmen are taller and leaner with a uniform complexion. Although only eleven degrees from the equator the coastal strip is never unbearably hot as the cold Humboldt current sweeps up the coast and keeps Lima under constant cloud. They expect about an hour of sunshine each day. It does not rain either - or rarely. Rain comes once every hundred years and the last shower was only eighty years ago.

Everything depends on irrigation and the rain that falls in the High Andes. A dry Winter means traffic jams as everyone rushes home from work to use the water that is turned on for two hours in the evening. The High Andeans are short and barrel-chested with bright rosy cheeks. This is due to the thin atmosphere and they have developed huge lungs and overlarge hearts to cope with the lack of oxygen. They also have 20% more red blood cells than normal. Their work is physically very hard and life expectancy about 57 years. They feel dizzy at lower levels just as we and the Limans feel the effects of altitude.

The Spaniards appliquéd Western civilisation and religion onto the Inca culture and the stitches still show. A large part of the Catholic church built over the Temple of the Moon in Cusco fell down at the last earthquake and it is possible to see the two together. The stark simplicity of the temple with its empty trapezoidal niches contrasts sharply with the ornate and showy decoration in the church. One wall of the temple would have had a huge gold sunburst on it, but this was melted down by the Spaniards and the Incas forbidden to worship the sun any more. The niches had once contained the mummified remains of the Inca "saints" and these had been paraded before the folk every year. The Spaniards decreed that Christian saints should be paraded instead an the Inca mummies disappeared from view but not from practice. The cross on the high altar boasts the Inca sun behind it and the effigies of the Madonna all have triangular skirts. I am told, by Juan, that the Incas slipped the mummies under the triangular skirt so that they were still paraded because to see such a parade was to be blessed for the year. "Of course," he said, " it is so much easier now." "Because Christianity is well-established?" I asked. "Not that!" he said shocked, "You don't have to turn out now. You get blessed just the same if you see it on television."

The Uros Indians on their floating islands on Lake Titicaca high in the Andes have the same happy knack of mixing Ancient and Modern. Their islands are built up of tortora reed which is cut from the lake and lashed together to form platforms three feet thick. Houses and the one school are also made of the reed. They have to add another layer t every three months or so. When you step ashore the whole island rocks and walking from one side to the other is a strange experience. The ladies spread their goods on blankets and sit behind them on the "ground".

On my visit they were enjoying huge ice-creams and one of the party asked where they had them from. A lady pointed to the reed hut behind her. "Can we buy them there?" she was asked. She shook her head and took another mighty lick. "Freezer very small." she said. How do you get a freezer on a floating island? It seems that an enterprising German salesman went out to the islands and persuaded the inhabitants of this one to invest in solar panels. Small deposit and seven years to pay. They will own their panels in 2005. I looked into one tiny hut and there was a Baby Belling boiling ring and a 26" television set with just enough room to sit in front of it. The Lake is some sixty miles long and the bottom end, about fifteen miles of it, is in Bolivia. The local politics are volatile to say the least. The islands are now tethered to stakes driven into the bed of the lake since a storm in the Winter of 1999 caused one set of islanders to wake up in Bolivia. Hilda, my informant , smiled a slow gentle smile as she said: "Took them a month to sail it back. For the last bit someone lent them an outboard motor." 

Inland from Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, and climbing yet higher lie the peasant farms of the Alto Plano. The mountainsides rising above the High Plain are a chequerboard of cultivated strips running in different directions. I suddenly realised that I was looking at the Peruvian version of the medieval  Three Field System. The depth of soil, where it exists at all, varies greatly and each farmer has little strips of good bad and indifferent. The farmer who welcomed folk into his home was living the same life as his Inca ancestors. His daughter was about to marry and the adobes, cut from the local claybed, were stacked in the yard to dry and ready to build a new room for the couple.

Like the Incas of old the present day folk still build each room as a separate unit and to get from one room to another always have to go outside. There is no such thing as a connecting door. Even in the city of Cusco this is often the case. On this farm bedroom and living room were one. The farmer sat on his bed, beaming at these wonderful guests who had honoured him with a visit. The guests were actually feeling a little self-conscious and intrusive. He proudly showed us the certificates gained by his son and pinned above his bed. This was a large sack stuffed with straw and reeds and placed directly on the earthen floor. Hand-woven blankets and llama skins were piled on top and he showed us how he went to bed in Winter wearing his boots and woolly hat and rolled himself in the skins for warmth. In pride of place on the wall, even outshining the certificates, was his wife's new hat. The farm had shown a small profit for the year and he had spent it on a new bowler for his wife. "Very hard! Rain and things fall on her and she not hurt."  

He showed us how he tilled the unforgiving soil. A broad spade would be useless here. He had a long piece of wood, about six inches wide, and on one end was fastened a narrow piece of a harder wood. This was shaped to a taper but not a point. It had the effect of a pickaxe but was used like a spade. This was the tool he used to dig his fields up and down the mountains, leaving the house in the dark so as to start work as soon as it was light and returning when it was too dark to work. He had some llamas and two bulls and these were in the care of his wife. She sat out on the plain all day watching the stock and doing her knitting or crochet. The weekly market was the high point of her existence when she met another woman and had someone to share a conversation. The new room , when built, would have a topping out ceremony  when a cross would be placed on the apex as a blessing. To be quite sure of the blessing there would be models of  the two bulls as well! An Inca doesn't take risks. 

My meeting with the Incas far outshone everything that I had dared to hope for it and I was left in no doubt that all Incas are Peruvians but not all Peruvians are Incas.