Inca memories

I adore the Peruvian dress, the colorful full skirts, the intricate woven cloth from alpaca and llama. Small groups of inhabitants milled about every place we went asking for coins if we took their pictures or pet the baby alpaca. It touched me to see a red llama which reminded me of my llama, Crissy, at Machu Picchu. The town of Cusco is laid out in the form of a puma. Snake, puma and condor were the three main sacred animals of the Inka - well, I imagine llamas were also!
At the terraced site of the temple of the Sun the day after Machu Picchu, I was reminded of my small affinity to the Inca. There is a rock which juts out from Red Bud mountain on the path by the creek to the river which looks like a turtle head. I have over the years left rocks and wishes and gratitude on this cool rock face. For the Incas out crops of rocks on the mountains were worshiped as, in the case in the sacred valley, as the messenger to God. Our guide, Carlos, pointed out the nose and cheek bones, eyes and forehead and beard. Further up on the same mountain was an outcrop of rock in the image of a king - the constellation, Pleiades, moves during the year in the night sky adjacent to this face, telling of weather for the growing season. To the right of the messenger to God, is a stone storage building which is a passive refrigerator for potatoes and other vegetables. The Inca terraces are intricate, rocks on the bottom, then pebbles, then sand and last humus. They cultivated thousands of types of vegetables (especially potatoes).