With Good Reason

Standing in my room in the attic, I look through the window at a hill ten kilometres away. There is nothing special on it except for the ruins of an old stone and mud-mortar fortress. There, the Inca soldiers dominated all of the valley of Santiago, Chile, ensuring that the trade routes were free from pillage.

A hundred years before the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, the Incas invaded Chile, bringing their technology, customs and many words to enrich the language. They also brought the caravans of llamas that carried on their backs a large variety of products: dried meat and fish, textiles, ceramics, jewellery, copper axes, obsidian, religious artifacts, and all things characteristic of the early Inca empire.

Each caravan had hundreds of llamas, guided by men who kept their accounts in quipus (knotted cords for accounting) or played their zampoñas (pan flutes).

Today everything has changed. Even the horses and carriages of colonial times are gone. One single heavy truck today carries the same load as a caravan of hundreds of llamas; calculators have replaced the quipus; and FM radios have silenced the zampoña. In my day, there are modern roads and heavy trains where the Inca roads used to be. Everything rushes by, and the Internet connects us to the world.

However, sometimes on days like today it seems as though I can see the spirit of the Inca looking at me from the fortress of that hill, directly into my eyes, through my window.