The presented fragment contains numerous legends and historical evidence of the existence of an extensive system of underground tunnels under Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Chile and the allegedly hidden treasures there. It serves as an excellent addition to my research of the oldest (about 17 million years old) underground settlement of Tulana-Chimostok ("Seven Caves"), in which the distant ancestors of the Indians of both Americas hid from the darkness and cold.
And in Mexico, and in the harsh and desert highlands of the Andes, in Peru and on the roads that the conquistadors traveled to Potosí and Argentina, the traveler can see, especially at dusk, a strange glow called "la lus del dinero" - "light of money" … This is a phenomenon for which modern science has not yet found an explanation. Indeed, it seems that no European physicist has ever heard of him. This phenomenon can be observed at the hour when the disloyal twilight envelops a secluded trail that runs through mountain ranges and dull plateaus from ancient Cusco.
Of course, a European or an American, leaving this ancient city of sad memories, will perceive all the delights of such a path, only being in the right mood and frame of mind. And yet this phenomenon is not at all a subjective illusion that exists only in the minds of one traveler who has just left the melancholic abode of ghosts, where the ghosts of arrogant Spanish hidalgo with furious, gloomy eyes wander in the pale light of the moon through squares and dark streets, past carved gates, decorated with coats of arms with mythical animals standing on their hind legs. (And yet neither a Castilian or Extremadurian soldier, clad in armor and long chain mail, with a musket spewing fire, nor a cold-blooded sadiet monk basking near his flaming auto-da-fe - no one could snatch the secrets of their buried treasures from the meek Incas with pensive eyes!)
When trembling on a horse ridge or walking along any of these old Spanish golden paths that lead from the mines to the ports of the coast, whether in Peru or Argentina, around some bend of a cold rocky trail, you can find treasure hunters everywhere - Indian or mestizo, or even white. And this man will swear that in a secluded canyon, slightly away from the ancient golden path, one evening, when the sun had just set in its ocean cradle, behind the inaccessible walls of mountain ranges, and the stars lit up in the deep blue of heaven, he saw a strange whitish or a pale green glow that hovers over the rocky ground.
“This la lus del dinero, senor,” he will say. - "This is the light of money." And he will point out where, in his opinion, "tapadas" is hidden - a cache of jewels hidden in the ground!
The colonial Spanish road from Potosi to Tuku-mana is full of holes - where whole generations of treasure hunters tried to find "tapadas". Some of these tapadas may contain royalist gold or church treasures buried in the days when the monarchist army retreated before the legions of Simon Bolivar “Liberador” the Liberator. At dusk or darkness, these mysterious lights can glide like a snake along the road. And sometimes they stand in place, like the columns of the ancient Inca temple of the Sun, or take the form of some kind of tropical trees. Seekers of "tapadas" mark such a place with a pole and look forward to the new day, indulging in fun in a warm company. They drink wine, sing songs, dance fandango - but not one of them, be it a mestizo or a pure-blooded Indian, would think of looking for a treasure in the dark. After all, everyone knows that at night the abyss of demons hangs around the treasure! No one for any treasures of the world will dare to disturb the evil spirits of darkness, guarding treasures on the high plateaus of this "terra fria" - cold land.
“Si, senor, asta manyana - see you tomorrow! And tomorrow we will return and hunt for gold where the light of money was burning!"
I have heard the suggestion that this light appears due to the release of gases, the same, perhaps, as in the case of the mysterious ns-Faro de Catatumba "-" Lighthouse of the Catatumba "in the Gulf of Maracaibo - the oil region of Venezuela. Maybe so, Or maybe not. Some people consider this phenomenon to be similar to the "wandering lights", which often appeared a hundred years ago near the undrained swamps and swamps of England. One of my acquaintances - an old blind cripple who himself had a "gold rush", swore that this " Luz del Dinero "is nothing more than radioactive radiation from gold buried in the ground. But radioactivity is usually not associated with the decay of stable atoms, such as gold atoms. It is better to say that this mystery is still unsolved.
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An old friend of mine, an engineer, nephew of the Bishop of Ba-ta-i-Wells, spent many years of his adventurous life in Argentina and Mexico. He told:
“I owned a gold mine in South America, which I found by the faint bluish-white glow emanating from the ground. I started digging in that place and came across a very rich layer of quartz rock, lying just an inch from the soil surface. I always found metal by digging where lights could be seen at dusk. Peons and Indians are afraid of this phenomenon and bypass it far. If it were not for the fear of the supernatural, many more treasures could be found by this sign. He always just shook me, this Luz del Dinero. It resembles the burning of alcohol - with blue flames. It is visible from afar, and the Indians and "greasers" (a contemptuous nickname for Mexicans or Hispanics of Spanish or Portuguese descent) swore to me that the glow spreads over the entire area that metal occupies underground. Once, while in Mexico, I was filming an old hacienda in which, as the old Indian woman told me, I saw the "light of money." I searched everything I could, both the walls and the floor, but found nothing. And the person who settled there after me found in the roof a full pot of golden ducats."
That's it - and no witchcraft. Incorrect flickering of the "light of money" always speaks of the existence of an amazing, mysterious treasure. That may be the treasures of the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa, who was killed by the Spaniards, which, according to the Spanish chroniclers and historians, were 600-650 tons of gold and jewelry worth 3.4 million gold pieces - "epesos de oro"! (If we even take a more moderate figure - at least 300 tons, considering these treasures as ordinary gold and disregarding their antique value, and take the value of gold as 7.1 pounds per Trojan ounce (as before the Second World War), then in 1938 such a treasure would cost about 147 million pounds, or 835 million dollars …) And yet there is every reason to believe that these untold treasures, as one Inca dignitary Benalkazar said to the conqueror of Quito,- just like one grain against the harvest of the whole field compared to another, very ancient treasure, which I will talk about in this chapter.
Hente Descent, a noble of Old Spanish descent who now occupies all administrative posts in Lima and La Paz, could have been more helpful to the adventurous gringos of New York and London in their search for these incredible Inca treasures if it were not for fear of the vigilance of the Quechua Indians still remembering the slain Inca, the emperor of the Sun. They can raise an uprising at the first attempt of such research. These oppressed Indians, now little like the Incas that can be seen in the paintings in the old church of St. Anne (located near melancholic Cusco), dream of the day when, led by their newly reincarnated ancestors, they will see that the Wheel has described full circle, and the former glory of the ancient Inca empire shone again in the west of the South American continent.
Quechua legends say that the lost treasures of the Incas lie in dense forests or in the depths of lonely mountain lakes, where constantly overhanging shadows retreat to their underworld only for a short while at the hour when the almost vertical rays of the midday sun touch the deep sleepy waters and penetrate uncharted caves. And the "sesame" to these caves are mysterious hieroglyphs, the key to which is held by only one descendant of the Inca in each generation. Perhaps the resulting ray makes its way into the strange dungeons, carved thousands of years ago by an unknown highly civilized race of South America in those distant times when the Peruvians were just miserable savage nomads wandering in the mountains, or, perhaps, lived in some now sunken Pacific the continent from which they still had to get to America.
“If one were to collect all the gold buried in Peru, it would be impossible even to appreciate it - so great is its quantity. And what went to the Spanish conquistadors cannot even be compared with what was left. The Indians say: the treasures are hidden so securely that even we ourselves do not know where exactly!"
This is what the Peruvians said to Sieze de Leon, the soldier-priest, 15 years after the conquest of Peru. However, they did not consider it necessary to add that some of them nevertheless knew and jealously guarded this great secret. Sieza de Leon adds:
"In 1598, over eight months, 35 million gold and silver were sent to Seville on three ships."
And Chrysostom Lasso (Garcillaso de la Vega) said that the greatest of the world's treasures seemed to vanish into thin air, despite all the cunning and all the villainy of the gold-mad adventurers, despite all the ingenuity of the cruelest thugs that have ever set foot on this earth, for all diseases and calamities caused by wars. Truly, the sun god avenged the death of the meek and noble Inca to greedy and fanatical sadists from Castile, Extrem-fool and Aragon. Their descendants in these lands of distant Spain awaited a swamp of unemployment and general poverty. Their food became so scarce that some caballero, who wanted to make a gift to a senorita, the queen of his heart, or a noble girl - "don-seli onrada", presented her with a smoked ham or a large fragrant pie with capon,or a piece of beef instead of a jeweled miniature or a bouquet of flowers (which, after all, could not calm the howling of an empty stomach) - and then he was called a noble knight. As for the common people of old Spain - what could expect them when the most valuable wealth of ancient America flowed to Seville and Madrid? Some hungry boy thought he was lucky to be hired to carry heavy loads as well as adult "esportilleros" - porters. Through this hard work, he earned a soldo, a coin that was barely enough to satisfy his hunger with a bowl of monastery soup. Yes, Spain suffered a surprisingly ironic retribution for the fact that its conquistador bandits and fanatical black monks destroyed an ancient civilization, a country in which there was not a single hungry person,naked or homeless, and where gold served only for decoration, and not as a medium of exchange. Let's raise the curtain of this historical drama.
And today in Cajamarca you will be shown the very room that Inca Atahualpa had to fill with gold as a ransom. There was a pile of gold ornaments, piled up to the height of the Inca's outstretched arm and the width of his arms spread out to the side. The conquistadors were not particularly shy, figuring out how much the freedom of His Majesty Inca might cost! A simple calculation shows that this room could hold about $ 500 million in gold, or, say, £ 100 million. The conquistadors did not like jewelry. They were tired of the stones, because they found in this Peruvian empire so many wonderful emeralds, pearls, turquoise and pure diamonds that all these trinkets were no longer worth a penny. Gold bars were preferred - until they became so common that any soldier would rather have taken a Castilian stallion instead.a quart of wine or a pair of shoes.
Don Francisco Pizarro, "Governor and Marquis of Peru," drew a bright red line to the walls of this treasury of Aladdin or Ali Baba, which was 40 feet wide and 20 feet long, which the Inca promised to fill with gold at this mark. The red line ran 9 feet above the stone floor … Spanish soldiers tore off the gold plates that covered the walls of the royal palace in Cuzco, and the gold roofing pipes, a yard (91.44 cm) wide and 20 feet long, that ran around the entire the roofs of the palace are like a crown. The soldiers also reached the golden pipes, through which clear water flowed from mountain glaciers, feeding five beautiful fountains in the wonderful park of the Temple of the Sun. For a month, local goldsmiths melted the gold from the Cuzco temple into ingots, each of which today would cost about 5 million pounds, or 25 million dollars. The jewelry work of some of the gold items was so exquisite that even the rude bandit Pizarro kept several of them to send to Spain, to the court.
Like all conquerors of the world, the Castilians and Est-Remadurians did not forget about their other desires, and after a hard battle, each soldier wanted to have fun.
These brave warriors worshiped Venus as zealously as they did Midas' golden donkey ears. In a very rare book published in Frankfurt am Rhine 66 years after the conquest of Peru, I found an amusing sketch, or rather a piquant sketch. (This book is the Latin history of America, but the way of thinking of its author would hardly have met with the approval of later Spanish historians!) This is what happened after the momentous victory over the Inca army under the walls of ancient Cuzco. The Spaniards ate and slept all night as they could, for they held out in battle like the Israelites in the starving armies of David. And in the morning they went to a village a mile from their camp at Kakha-mark. On the way, they came across the Imperial open baths, in which many beautiful naked Indian women splashed … The text contains a picture:bearded Castilians flop into the water and drag the relaxed women into the nearby bushes. These women, along with all the others who were raped in the Inca camp, were, in total (according to this old and not too restrained Spanish chronicler) at least five thousand! Alas, judging by the records of this Latinist historian, Venus, Bacchus and Midas rarely rested in that 1533 in the dying empire of Peru!
When the captive Atahualpa was taken to Pizarro, the Inca emperor wore a magnificent necklace of huge, bright emeralds around his neck. These stones kindled the insane greed of the conquistadors. Sieza de Leon wrote:
“If the Spaniards, entering Cuzco, did not commit indecent acts, if they did not show their cruelty so soon by killing Atahualpa, one can only guess how many large ships would be required to transport to Spain those treasures that are now buried in the bowels of the earth and they will remain there forever, because those who buried them are already dead."
Pizarro immediately sent three scouts to Cuzco, and these soldiers-conquistadors brought back a lot of gold to the Spanish camp in Cajamarca. Each equestrian soldier received his share, which was exactly 8.8 thousand old gold coins ("castillanos de oro") and 362 marks of silver (a measure of precious metals, approximately equal to 250 grams). Infantry received half the amount. Immediately after such a division, a large gaming saloon began to operate, in which the game was played day and night - a game like which the world had never seen!
John Garris in his "Moral History of the Spanish West Indies (London, 1705)" described these events so vividly, as if he himself had witnessed them - and this is two hundred years later! “The debts were paid in gold bars, and not a single Spaniard objected if the creditor demanded a double payment. Nothing was as cheap, readily available, or readily available as gold and silver. A sheet of paper went for ten golden castillianos."
Three of Pizarro's scouts brought back, among other things, the treasures they had stolen from the Temple of the Sun in ancient Cuzco. They captured a huge number of gold and silver vessels, under the weight of which two hundred Indian porters bent and sweated. Just to lift one such vessel, twelve people were required, and when the majestic and massive golden throne of the Inca was delivered to the Spanish camp, Pizarro must have felt like Nadir Shah in the middle of the 18th century, burst into the meeting of the Divan in the ancient Mughal throne room in Delhi and took to Iran a huge throne with golden peacocks.
The Queen of the Incas, as it was said in the Quechua tradition I heard in Peru, offered to fill the room with gold to the height of an outstretched hand for the release of her husband until sunset of the third day. She fulfilled her promise, but Pizarro did not keep his word. Struck by the magnificence of the collected treasures, he declared: "I will not release the Inca, but I will kill him if you do not tell where all these treasures come from." Pizarro heard, continues the same local tradition, that the Inca had a secret inexhaustible gold mine or a huge mysterious vault located in a vast underground tunnel stretching for many miles under the Inca's imperial possessions. The wealth of the country was kept there.
The unfortunate queen begged for a delay, while she herself went to consult with the oracle of the priests of the Sun. During the sacrifice, the high priest told her to look into the Black Mirror.
She looked and, shuddering, saw the fate of her husband, which could not be changed, regardless of whether or not the gold was given to the conquistadors and Catholic bandits. Shocked, horrified, the queen ordered that the entrance to the huge tunnel - a stone door in the rock - be walled up, which was done under the direction of the high priest. The gorge itself, where the entrance was located, was firmly closed and hidden - it was covered to the top with fragments of rock, when the level of this embankment was equal to the level of the ground, it was masked with green grass and bushes, so that everything began to look like a natural mountain meadow, and there was no sign that there was any crevice in that place. The Spaniards were left with nothing, while the secret of the tunnel was known only to purebred Indians by birth - the Quechua Incas. But they never knew her mestizos or half-breeds,for it was believed that they could not be trusted with such knowledge.
(Later I will give an interesting continuation of this story.)
When the fateful day came, Inca asked to be taken outside so he could see a comet, huge, ominous green, crossing the Peruvian skies. This was a July or August day in 1533. The famous Dominican monk, fanatical sadist Valverde, who in his "Holy Inquisition" sought to flood the whole of Europe, Asia and America with blood and tears, offered to strangle the Inca. This was done - for the sake of saving the soul of the unfortunate emperor - after he was baptized. He was told that in this way he would be able to avoid being burned alive in public in Plaza Cuzco. Then a funeral mass was served, followed by a solemn funeral, with the singing of funeral songs, with screams ascending to the cruel heavens. Gonzalo and Francisco Pizarro, dressed in mourning clothes, were also in the temple among the mourning subjects. Was it just hypocrisy, or did they really feel a kind of remorse or remorse? Who can look into the dark depths of the souls of these cruel, harsh and fearless people who were zealous Catholic Christians, courageous pioneers and at the same time villains who stopped at nothing to get gold?
Theodore de Brie in 1596 described Vincente de "Balle Verde" (ironic pun - "valle verde" means "green valley" in Spanish. - approx. Transl.). Here he is approaching the Inca Indians among crowds of distraught … He carried the cross and the Breviary, or, "as some say, the Bible …" The engraving also shows the offending word Pizarro and the Inca, whom he ordered to strangle "his nigger." Pizarro rejects the advice of several Castilian captains to send the Inca to Spain "to Kaiser Carlos the Fifth, does not listen to people telling him that a Spaniard should not stain his hands with the blood of a defenseless man, a king, moreover" … In honor of the dead emperor, Pizarro dressed in mourning and ordered about burial ceremony. "The gold and silver brought to Cajamarca by the Indians were weighed. There were 26 thousand pounds of pure silver,gold for 3,600,500 castillanos, which the Spaniards called "pesos". They gave the King of Spain, Carlos V, a fifth (400 thousand pesos), which means that the lord of the king was cheated in the carve-up! Each conquistador received 8.9 thousand gold pesos and 185 pounds of silver, nineteen captains - 30-40 thousand gold pesos each, while Francisco Pizarro's brother - Hernando - received a fifth of all the treasures. Indeed, as de Bry wisely remarks: "The barbaric murder of this leader, * Inca, did not go unpunished, since later those who conspired against him themselves died a cruel death." It may also be added that in the next century, the Spanish "Council for Indies" in Seville did not allow a single person to leave Seville on any galleon bound for the "Indies" until he provided written evidence thatnot related to Pizarro or Almagro … (omitted)
… “I had a picture of the sun made of gold, which the Incas kept in the House of the Sun in Cusco, and which is now in the monastery of St. Dominic. I think it costs at least two thousand pesos. Since I am dying in poverty, having many children, I pray to His Catholic and Royal Majesty, our lord Felipe, el rey (king), to have mercy on them, and maybe the Lord will have mercy on my soul."
Legisamo lost that little "sun" on the evening of the day he got it. “He lost his sun before dawn,” as the monk Brother Acosta said about him. But this Legisam's "sun" - a gold disc with a face engraved on it, was just a cover from a large, hollow stone in the outer wall of the temple, where people made libations of chichi (fermented maize beer) at the Raimi festival (this name, by the way, reminds and the sun god of ancient Egypt, Ra).
On both sides of the image of the Great Sun were placed the embalmed bodies of thirteen Incas, in golden chairs, standing on golden platforms. They sat in these chairs during their lifetime. The offended Indians rushed to hide these sacred mummies along with the remains of treasures, and only 26 years later the greedy and indefatigable conquistador Polo de Ondegardo stumbled upon the remains of three kings and two queens (the latter were previously in a similar temple of the moon). All the mummies, of course, had all their jewels ripped off, and they themselves were torn to shreds by the sacrilegious hands of insatiable treasure hunters.
In the same 1533, together with the royal mummies, a huge, natural-growth, golden statue of the Inca Huayne Kapaka (the penultimate ruler of the empire. - approx. Transl.) Was buried in the ground, and only one person knew the secret of this treasure, and he, again Still, he could not be either Spaniard or half-breed mestizo.
In 1550, the Peruvians honestly told Pedro Cieza de Leon: "If the Christians have not found the Inca treasures, it is because even we do not know where they are hidden." But if, por la Santissima Virhun (for the sake of the Most Holy Theotokos), there were at least one person who confessed that he knew at least something about one such treasure, El Virrey would have experienced such a kind, Catholic, ardent desire to save his soul, burdened the cursed memory of the hidden gold that would set it on fire, fry it in oil and finish it off with a wonderful bonfire in the open square of Cuzco or Lima. Until the secret is revealed to the audience! At that colorful time, no one dared to think of boasting knowledge of this kind of thing or trying to lead greedy Castilian officers into the ghostly golden gardens of the Inca - unless, of course, they wanted to choose a more common method of suicide. It was better to keep such information to yourself, being far from justice and the al-gwasils of old Spain! If el virrei or adelantado (the leader of the conquistadors' detachment. - approx. Per.) Admitted that someone was too frequent in vodagas (cellars) and posadas (taverns) and chatting with friends about where to buy hacienda, they would send this man to the lord corregidor (judge), and put him in a carsel (behind bars) in order to find out the reason for his exorbitant welfare and henceforth save him from such evil.they would send this man to the lord corregidor (judge), and put him in a carsel (behind bars), in order to find out the reason for his exorbitant well-being and henceforth save him from such evil.they would send this man to the lord corregidor (judge), and put him in a carsel (behind bars), in order to find out the reason for his exorbitant well-being and henceforth save him from such evil.
Fragment from the book by G. Wilkins "The Lost Cities of South America"