CHARLES C. MANN - Cary Academy

72 NUMBERS FROM NOWHERE?Inka masonry amazed the conquistadors, who could not understand howthey put together such enormous stones without mortar or draft animals.And it was astonishingly durable-the U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham pho·tographed the fortress of Saqsawaman in 1913, and found it in near~perfectcondition despite four centuries of neglect. ~ 2f;luY ~.),0, J~ m, (!LtJjc£) ~UClj) "9il.-L- U.M.- -'6 1-k.L. ,J) facades ran enormous plates of polished gold. When the alpine sun filledAwkaypata, with its boldly delineated honzontal plam of white sand and'\Jl V' ,,y ~cdY.( sloping sheets of gold, the space became an amphitheater for the exaltanon~V l(j-oQ\~~ _ of light. .'l\\J;/~~In Pachakuti's grand design, Awkaypata was the center of the emPIre-,6~ and the cosmos. Will the great ~laz;a rad~ated fQlJ~ ~ighways that ~emarcated __l\(\ 0 :y) the four asymmetrical sectors mto which he diVIded the empIre, Tawan-~ ! tinsuyu, "Land of the Four Quarters." To the Inka, the quarters echoed the. ~y heavenly order. The Milky Way, a vast celestial river in Andean cosmology,. earth's orbit. For six months the stream of sta~s slants across the sky from, soto speak, northeast to southwest; the other SlX ,:"onths it slants from south-,¥ east to northwest. The transition roughly comcldes With the transmonbetween dry and wet seasons-the nme when the Mllky Way releases hfe·U giving water to Pacha Mama, Mother Earth-and divides the heavens into\ four quarters. Awkaypata, reflecting this pattern, was the axis of the universe...Nllt.Qply that, Qosqo was the center of a second spiritual pattern. Radiatingout from Awkaypata was a drunken spiderweb of forty-one crooked,.if i crosses the Peruvian sky at an angle of about twenty·eight degrees to the'-c/'~~ rrl' \ISedonC{ -In the Land of Four QuartersiVu-'Ui~7>~73 Ch.1;f'7/-