Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Inca Stone No.2




PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - "Cuzco," part 6: And it was in Cuzco in 1536, that Manco Inca, brother of Atahualpa, finally angered over the way he and his people were treated, turned the tables on Pizarro by secretly gathering an army of warriors from throughout his kingdom and converging his regiments in a four way clamp onto Cuzco where the Spanish numbered fewer than 170 plus black slaves. There, through the sheer force of numbers, Manco's infantry with slings and arrows and bolos, and yipping and howling and blowing loudly on conch shells, bottled up the Spanish cavalry, attacking in tight areas where horses and their armor were cumbersome, until the whole of the Spanish force that had ruled Cuzco, grazing on its treasures and on the wives and courtesans of Inca noblemen whose best houses they had claimed as their own; were confined into two smokey, stone buildings on the edge of the plaza, while the Incas burned Cuzco,  their own capital, a city of stone walls and thatched roofs.