[The following is a document kept in the notes of archaeologist Arthur Doyle, minus the many annotations he's scribbled all over the paper.]
Found in the Alvarez Residence Library, Algeciras, Spain, Nov. 1977
Manuscript verified as original by the Archaeological Museum of Asturias, July 27, 1978
Translated to English by Emanuel Yupanqui, 1981
--Testaments of an Incan Heathen--
-Writ February 15 by Francisco Alvarez, in the Year of our Lord Fifteen Hundred and Eighty Six.-
My grandfather lies sick and dying in an adjacent bedroom, even as I am writing this now, at his mortal request, being the only member of our bloodline that can read and write Spanish with any fluency. I have sworn to him that I'll do my best in trying to find a publisher who'll distribute this final tale he has to tell, but I should not wonder if I'm unable to find one; not only is his tale nonchristian and blasphemous as only a savage's can be, it's not even properly heathen, as by his own admission it is just as unbelievable to his own Incan people and strange to their beliefs as it is to our holiest Christian faith. Nevertheless, his conviction in the truth of this tale is adamantine, and as the omen of death looms closer he grows ever more paranoid that if it is unwritten it shall be lost forever, along with that idolatrous and supposedly almighty Jewel he alone obsesses over, as he has for the entirety of his adult life. I cannot claim to share the convictions of the poor old Inca lunatic -- I'm a Spaniard by my father, and an educated and pious Spaniard at that, so far be it from me to bemoan that his imaginary Supreme Huaca should never be found again -- but I also cannot in good conscience deny the dying wish of my own flesh and blood, and so, herein will I recount the story.
I suppose some brief recounting of the basic heathen beliefs of the Inca as a prelude is in order, as I do not expect many of my good Christian brethren would be familiar enough with their idolatry to follow the tale otherwise. Let us begin, then, with the creation of the world, as it is understood by the savages:
1. Traditional Incan beliefs
Like us, they believe that there exists One Supreme Being, the God of Creation, whose powers are superordinate to that of all other beings in the Universe; and Him, they name as Apu Qun Tiqsi Wiraqutra. He is a man, tall of a stature and full of beard, clothed always and entirely in garments whose splendor defies human imagination, who has existed long before the beginning of the World and will continue to exist long after the end of the World. Despite this clear belief in an Almighty, however, the heathens will never deny the existence of the lesser and petty gods whose existence an Almighty should render superfluous, and when Wiraqutra created the most major of these lesser gods and the world they inhabit, he is believed to have left the World in their care, and walked away, over the Ocean, to lands stranger and more exotic than any mortal will ever know.
Wiraqutra is believed to have created the world at what is now Lake Titicaca, after emerging from Paqariq Tampu, the Cave of Creation; and seeing Darkness, he created Light. Paqariq Tampu has since flooded with water, creating the Lake: this is the largest body of fresh water in South America, the highest lake in the world by elevation, and one of if not the most sacred locations in the world to the barbarous Andean Peoples, including the Inca. It was there, on the islands of the Lake, that He created the greatest of the lesser Incan gods: On what is now the island Isla del Sol, He created the Inca's most venerated god, Inti, the Sun, and commanded him to rise and set, thereby starting Time; On what is now Isla de la Luna, He created Mamaquilla, the goddess of the Moon and wife of Inti; on the island Amantani, He created the goddess Pachamama, Mother Earth; on the island Taquile, He created Illapa, the god of Weather; and within the water of Lake Titicaca itself was created Mama Cocha, the goddess of Water and the Seas.
These 5 deities -- Mamaquilla, Illapa, Pachamama, Mama Cocha, and most especially Inti -- are revered far, far more than almighty Wiraqutra by the savage Incan people. They receive more sacrifices, have more temples, and have more festivals and observances dedicated to their worship than to the Supreme Being, and in all the years of conquest by the Royal Crown, we have never recovered any treasure of value related to Him; what flagrant defiance of Holy Truth! Many idols, known as Huacas, are distributed among the Inca, for the purposes of worship; but it's generally held that 5 of these, the 5 Sacred Huacas, are of much greater importance and hold much greater mystical powers than any other, as each is associated with one of the above 5 deities in the Incan pantheon. Supposedly, they were entrusted to the first Incan, Manco Cápac, after his creation by Wiraqutra and emergence from Paqariq Tampu in ancient times. Whatever mystic powers these Sacred Huacas actually have, of course, are no matter for the infinitely more civilized and powerful Spanish Crown; all of them have been hunted down and destroyed, as is just and proper for a crusade befitting our Faith in the good Christian Lord, and are now no more than bullion in the Spanish treasuries. That is, of course, unless my grandfather is to be believed.
2. The Wishing Jewel of Cuzco
According to my grandfather, all the Spanish, and almost all the Inca, are deceived, for there is a sixth Sacred Huaca; and this Supreme Huaca, the Jewel of Cuzco, is far, far more powerful than any of the others, for it is the Huaca of Wiraqutra himself. My grandfather even claims that it will grant any wish and answer any prayer uttered by the keeper of the Jewel, and this irreversibly. It was, at one point, the most closely guarded and valuable treasure of the Incan empire; a beautiful, glorious gemstone with supernatural radiance, kept in a secret vault-shrine beneath the emperor's palace at the Incan capitol city, Cuzco (from this, it earns its title), and the central icon of the Cult of Wiraqutra. My grandfather was a member of this cult, in his days as a strapping Incan youth; he was one of many assigned to guard the Jewel against thieves and misusers, and through this position came to know of the Jewel and its history with much greater thoroughness than the average Incan.
I should note that all of the above are the beliefs of my grandfather alone, and not even corroborated by the heathen savages that are supposedly his people. For instance, a Cult of Wiraqutra does exist among the Inca, but it is small, lacking in treasures, riches, and followers, and while it has Huacas just like any other Incan cult, it has no reference at all to this supposed Jewel of Cuzco, icon or otherwise; much less would it have employed guards for such a thing. Yet my grandfather insists that at one point it was the greatest of all cults in the Incan religion, with shrines and devotees scattered all across the country, and headquarters at a Great Temple built around Paqariq Tampu, on the island Pachakutiq in lake Titicaca, as this is the island that is holiest to Wiraqutra. Those readers of this who are familiar with the Geography of the New World might note that Lake Titicaca has no island Pachakutiq, and my grandfather would agree; he claims this island, and everything on it, sank to the depths of Lake Titicaca 53 years ago. It is the story of how that came to be that my grandfather wants so desperately to tell with his dying breath, and from here on that story will be told as he would tell it to me.
3. Cataclysm
Those devils in human clothing, the Spaniards, first came to our lands in late 1532, and quickly generated much deeply mistaken excitement within the cult; after all, word spread around that their leader (Francisco Pizarro, we learned later), appeared to be a Tall, White Man, with a Full, Magnificent Beard, was covered from head to toe in fine clothings unlike anything anyone had ever seen (European fine silks, it turned out,) and had walked over the Oceans with his men on the journey here. It had to be Wiraqutra come again!
For months before his meeting with our Emperor Atahualpa, all the cult was in a constant buzz to spread and then gobble up every bit of information rumors could carry about Pizarro: we told ourselves monstrous stories about the fantastically strange 4-legged beasts he would ride around everywhere, for we had never seen horses before; we marveled in awe at description of his great steel rod, that sliced effortlessly through the flesh of men, animals, and plants, for we'd never heard of swords before; we threw ourselves into the effort to learn the strange new tongue he and his followers spoke to each other, for we'd never encountered Spanish before; and we wondered with excited imaginations what secrets of divinity his strange oracle called the "Bible" contained, for we'd never even heard of written languages before, much less of books written by the Gods! Ships, manacles, cannons, firearms, metal armor, gunpowder; every day it was some new miraculous invention brought to us by the God Creation finding itself on every lip in the Incan Empire, and those of us who believed it really was him were over the moon, dying to see him with our own eyes for the first time.
But O, the follies of man! Obviously, it turned out that Pizarro was no god after all; just a glorified plunderer doing the dirty work of some greedy and distant king. Word was that our own Emperor himself regarded the new arrivals with deep suspicion; to him, what they actually seemed to be doing in our lands appeared to be little more than a typical military campaign of conquest, going from village to village, getting control of the place after dispelling resistance, and demanding large amounts of tribute, including a not inconsiderable number of our people to serve as their slaves. This was a source of a great controversy among the Incan people, but within the cult's most devoted ranks (myself included), we were generally dismissive of these claims. It's the right of Gods to demand sacrifice and obedience, after all, and some speculated he was simply putting a final end to the odious succession war between the Emperor and his brother Huascar (their father had died a few years beforehand), perhaps even intending to claim rule of the Incan peoples as God-King.
So oblivious to the truth was our fervor to welcome the God of Creation to our empire, that in time, we had pressured the Emperor into making what was undoubtedly the greatest blunder in the history of the Inca: we would take the Supreme Huaca from its Vault in Cuzco, take it to the host of the supposed god Wiraqutra, and in a show of piety, use it to wish him and his host good luck and great fortune in their endeavors among us. That wish, I have no doubt in my mind, singlehandedly killed the Incan Empire.
I was there when it happened, as an escort for the Jewel, always to keep my eye on it and its surroundings for the entirety of its journey to the meeting at Cajamarca, and back. I remember the looks on the Spaniard's faces: they hadn't the slightest understanding or caring for the significance of what had just happened to them. The Emperor said the words, the Jewel glowed its soft glow, we carefully replaced the Jewel in its container, and the entire time, the Spaniards looked as if they could hardly be bothered to stay awake. I think one of them actually yawned during the ceremony. The audacity! The Spaniards made it plain and obvious they regarded all our religion, all our traditions, all our culture and everything less highly than they did the mud on their shoes, as they openly disrespected the Emperor and deliberately spilled our ceremonial Chicha, brashly declaring it heresy to the Christian Truth or something. I couldn't believe what I was seeing! It was the first time, I think, that I had ever seriously considered that these were just men, and plain honorless thieves at that. And thanks to the Jewel, they were now all but invincible, and they didn't even know it!
Thankfully, Emperor Atahualca was not so foolish as to be entirely unprepared for treachery, bringing a force of several tens of thousands armed veterans to meet Pizarro's maybe 200 men in Cajamarca, along with the stone still firmly in his possession to give him the decisive advantage. As the Spaniard's suddenly improved luck would have it, both of those things had changed by the next day. For one, Atahualpa had suddenly decided to leave the bulk of his force outside the city and bring only an unarmed retinue with him when meeting with the Spaniards again the next day, as a gesture of peace; and for two, Huascar had apparently learned of the motion of the Jewel from a spy and had enacted a scheme to steal it while it was out of the Vault. Needless to say, that scheme proved successful, and soon I found myself captured and being escorted, along with the Jewel and most of its guard, to a small village south of Cuzco that had been serving as a hideout for some of Huascar's loyalists. I count myself lucky that I did; that very same day in Cajamarca, the Spanish had ambushed and then captured the Emperor during his meeting with them, and then proceeded to massacre several thousands of Atahualpa's soldiers without taking a single casualty themselves.
For that moment forward, the Spaniards were unstoppable. Every single battle they fought ended in decisive Spanish victory, and every last ounce of treasure in towns they pillaged always found themselves to the Spaniard's pockets. With Emperor Atahualpa their prisoner, they forced his loyal generals to back down, pay a ransom of an entire room filled with gold and two rooms with silver, and then killed him anyway; they were absolutely confident they could get away with any kind of barbarity by then, and that even while still being oblivious to the Jewel's boon. When the Spanish forces started their march on Cuzco later that year, there was no question whether they would be successful; it was only a matter of when and how.
Even my captors, Huascar's loyalists, gave up their scheme when they learned what the Jewel had done, and who the Spanish really were after their showing at Cajamarca. It was a pointless quest now, they said, that would at best only install Huascar as a puppet king to a ruined state under the Spaniard's gilded thumb. I had done no wrong, so they let me go, along with the rest of the Jewel's guard. Straightaway we took the stone back to the sacred land, in the temple at Pachakutiq, where it would be out of the Spaniard's reach, at least for a while. There, so near to Paqariq Tampu, it's powers would be at their strongest; and the eldest members of the Cult of Wiraqutra could convene in safety, and decide what was to be done.
Many wishes were made to try and stop the Spanish menace, but all of them failed. The Supreme Huaca's boon to the Spaniards would not be revoked; they had but to reach and they would take, and in time we all knew that meant they would have the Jewel. That could not be allowed! So we kept trying; and finally the Jewel granted a wish.
I was yet again in the room when it happened, close to the Jewel as a guardian of the Supreme Huaca. The elders were getting desperate, and in their desperation, just made a generic wish for protection. "Let the Spaniards never plunder the treasures of the Cult of Wiraqutra," they said. This prayer was answered, without contradicting the previous wish, by destroying the largest part of the Cult of Wiraqutra.
Later, I would learn that most of the greatest temples and shrines devoted to the worship of Wiraqutra had been converted to the worship of Inti, many of the holy places that remained were now holy to some other god, and the worship of Wiraqutra that remained now occured in smaller, poorer niche shrines that the Spanish never bothered to loot, since all portable artifacts that still existed in devotion to Wiraqutra had become crude, valueless wood carvings or common unpolished stones. I even saw the Jewel of Cuzco itself transform into a smooth, featureless rock in the moments before alarm shook the Temple to its core. But just then, I did not know that, nor did I care, because the very ground under my feet began to shake violently as soon as the wish was uttered, and I was swiftly made aware of a giant wave of water, rising up over all sides of the island to make a great and thunderous crashing sound all about. Instinctively, I reached for the Huaca, to keep it safe.
Pachakutiq, the island held to be sacred to Wiraqutra, had begun to sink into the Lake, taking Paqariq Tampu, the Jewel of Cuzco, the core Temple of Wiraqutra, and most of the cult's core priesthood all down to a watery grave with it. In truth, it felt more like falling than sinking; the entire island sunk like a stone, with such tremendous rapidity that the inrush of water behind it would allow nobody and nothing to float back up to the surface while the island was still sinking, no matter how buoyant they were or how they tried to swim.
We hit the lake floor with a great, resounding THUD. I didn't know how deep I was, but I couldn't even see the light of surface while I was down there. The inrush of water had come in with such force the temple walls had all collapsed as though they were made of sand, and carved stone boulders lay about me at the lake floor as the ruins of the temple. Miraculously, only the smallest fragments of the boulders had hit me, but I was not unhurt; the water itself had slammed into me with the force of a monstrous bull, and I felt a number of broken ribs in my chest. The elder beside me who had made the wish was not so lucky; the stone pedestal on which the Jewel had rested had fallen onto his chest and crushed it in like a grape, killing him instantly.
This was an agonizing few seconds; the only relief I had was the stone the Supreme Huaca had become still in my hand, maybe a single breath with which I could utter a wish to it, and maybe a minute to think of what that wish should be. "I wish I was safe!" was the only thing that sprung to mind.
I dropped the Supreme Huaca when I received a sudden, painful jolt that healed my ribs. If I had thought, for just a second, about what the ramifications of that were, I may have reached down, picked up the Huaca from its final resting place by the elder's dead and horrified face, and taken it with me, but alas I did not, and have regretted it ever since. I was instead, at the time, fascinated by what had just happened because of it: as the last bubble of the utterance of the wish escaped my lips, it suddenly grew huge, encompassing my head and my shoulders, and stayed there, centered on my head, and would not burst. The air inside was breathable, somehow fresh, and buoyed the bubble and myself up to the surface. It felt like a very long time spent in that muddy and bloody water, just floating up, and up, and up, until I reached the surface at last. The bubble stayed centered on my head for the next day and the next night, buoying me in the water that I may sleep without fear of drowning; and only the next morning did it burst, when at last I had drifted to the shore of Isla Taquile and could walk myself to safety.
Nobody I asked had any recollection of the existence of Pachakutiq. The spot between Isla Taquile and Isla del Sol had just been a featureless patch of water from the beginning, as far as anyone could recall. I once sunk a stone at the end of a long rope to find how deep it must have gone in the cataclysm; 100 people could stand on shoulders and still not reach that depth, I determined. Down there lies the Almighty, Supreme Huaca, just out of reach! When at last mortal man can make that dive, he'll find one of the greatest powers of the Universe just lying there for the taking!
Of course, I am regarded as a lunatic for even considering it. Nobody has any recollection of the Jewel of Cuzco either, by any name. I am the only one; and so it is lunacy, then, that I beg and plead and try and try to get the powers that be to try and recover the stone with me. They hear nothing. Worse, any dream I may have had was dashed with my capture by the Spanish; it wasn't 3 years later that I found myself as little more a common slave taken back to their mainland, half a world away from lake Titicaca and the Supreme powers it contains. The only hope now is that this message finds someone with the means and the will to make that dive and find that stone. If nobody does, it is lost, forever.
