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tunnels, which would leave even modern underground constructors green with envy, began behind the ‘six doors.’ These tunnels lead straight towards the coast, at times with a slope of 14 per cent. The floor is covered with stone slabs that have been pitted and grooved to make them slip-proof. If it is an adventure even today to penetrate these 55- to 65-mile-long transport tunnels in the direction of the coast and finally reach a spot 80 feet below sea level, imagine the difficulties that must have been involved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in transporting goods deep under the Andes to save them from the grasp of Pizarro and the Spanish Viceroy. The Great Ocean lurks at the end of the underground passages of ‘Guanape,’ so called after the island that lies off the coast of Peru here, because it is assumed that these passages once led under the sea to this island. After the passages have gone uphill and downhill several times in pitch darkness, a murmur and the strangely hollow sounding noise of surf is heard. In the light of the searchlight the next downhill slope ends on the edge of a pitch black flood which is identified as seawater. The present-day coast also begins here underground. Was this not the case in former times?”
     
    Scholars think that a search on the island of Guanape would be pointless, because there is nothing there to indicate that a passage from the mainland ever emerged on to it. “No one knows where these subterranean roads of the Incas and their ancestors end or whether they lead the way to the bursting treasuries of worlds that vanished long ago.”
    Francisco Pizarro and his rapacious followers had already suspected that gold treasures existed in impenetrable Inca hiding places. In 1532 the noble Spaniard promised the Inca ruler Atahualpa his life and freedom if he filled two-thirds of a room measuring 23 by 16 by 10 feet with gold. Atahualpa believed the word of the ambassador of Her Christian Majesty Juana the Mad (1479-1555). Day after day the Incas fetched gold until the room was filled to the required height. Then Pizarro broke his word and had Atahualpa executed (1533).
    In the same year the Spanish Viceroy elevated the Inca Manco Capac to the rank of shadow king. (He, too, was murdered by the Christian conquerors in 1544.) His death saw the end of the Inca dynasty, which had entered history with its legendary founder of the same name. According to the historians, 13 “Sons of the Sun” are supposed to have ruled the Inca kingdom between the first and the last Manco Capac. If we date its historically established beginning to around A.D. 1200 and its end to 1544, the year when the last sun king died, then this mighty empire that stretched from Chile to Ecuador, from the Andes north of Quito to Valparaiso in the south, must have been built up in barely 350 years. During this period, the first pre-Columbian empire in South America must have been welded together. For the conquered territories and peoples were not considered as occupation zones, but were integrated into the prevailing constitution. Progressive achievements in agriculture were passed on by trained officials, as were the smoothly functioning rules of a communal economic order.
    Did the Incas equip a network of 2,500 miles of well-built roads with rest-houses during the same span of time? Did they simultaneously build cities such as Cuzco, Tiahuanaco, Macchu Picchu, and the cyclopean fortresses of Oliantaytambo and Sacsahuamán? Did they also lay down water mains and work silver, tin and copper mines, whose products they alloyed to make bronze? And did they develop the goldsmith’s art, weave the finest cloth and make pottery with noble shapes “on the side,” as it were? I hardly dare speak of the high culture which they nurtured in addition during this limited 350 year period. But if it was not the Incas but their ancestors who should be credited with these wonderful achievements, surely the culture and tool