a magical journey in an ancient land
One hundred years before Spanish conquistadors arrive in South America, high in the Andes mountains, diviners read the entrails of sacrificed guinea pigs, condors whisper secrets to the snow-capped mountain gods known as Apus, and Machu Picchu is being built stone by sacred stone.
Mara is a 15th-century South American woman swept up in the spectacular rise of the continent’s great pre-Hispanic power: the Inca Empire.
This is her story.
When I was young enough to have only my baby teeth, I met a condor in the canyon where we lived.
Mama had sent me out to gather mushrooms when I came upon him eating a dead vizcacha. A string of flesh stretched from the furry body beside him up to his pale, hooked beak. His feet on the ground, the condor stood as tall as I did.
I fell a half-step back. He kept eating. The sun shone oily black rainbows on his feathers, the downy ruff at his neck startling white. When he had finished, he extended his bald head toward me, the fleshy wattle on top quivering. One intelligent eye, dark pupil ringed in yellow, examined me.
Meeting the condor’s eye, I heard the water in the creek caressing the stones, the breeze rustling the brush. But I also noticed the sigh of the stone receiving the water and the wood greeting the wind. A low, contented hum came from the earth at my feet, a higher-pitched vibration from the rock of the canyon wall at my back. The condor and I both stood, transfixed, listening to the song of the land.
Up over my head, the walls of the canyon seemed to crowd closer, began to spiral. Rushing filled my ears. The world spun around me, but I couldn’t stop staring past the round, reflective surface of his eye, into a more intimate darkness. A flash of blue—bright indigo, like afternoon sky—sliced apart the dark. The ground tilted away from me. I landed on my knees in the dirt.
What was that?
A question I could not answer for many years.
The condor spread his massive black and white wings, the feathers at the tips extending like long, reaching fingers. After a few ungainly hops, he took flight. One beat of his wings forced a gust of wind across my cheeks. He caught an updraft and glided high above me, disappeared beyond the canyon wall.
I imagined the condor soaring the afternoon winds, as I had seen them do, eyes tracking motions on the earth far below. The condor could fly all the way to the largest, most powerful mountain—Apu Ausangate, lord of all the lands from the snow-covered ridges, to the high grassland plains where our llamas and alpacas grazed, to the river valleys where corn grew, and far beyond.
From my home in the canyon, we could not see the mountain, but the Apu still watched over us, the condor his eyes on the wing. The great bird might land on the shoulder of the mountain, a rocky outcrop surrounded by ice-glazed cliffs. Whisper to the Apu all he had seen on his travels.
I told no one about meeting the condor. It was the one secret I kept through all the years of my childhood, before I learned my mother’s secret and it unraveled everything. But now I had met condor, I should have known—nothing remains hidden from the Apu.
Photos on this page by Kevin Floerke
Rebecca Brams 