Four centuries ago, a precious idol was hidden in the jungles of Peru. To the Incan people, it is still the ultimate symbol of their spirit. To William race, an American linguist enlisted by the U.S. Army to decipher the clues to its location, it's the ultimate symbol of the apocalypse...Carved from a rare stone not found on Earth, the idol possesses elements more destructive than any nuclear bomb--a virtual planet killer. In the wrong hands it could mean the end of mankind. And whoever possesses the idol, possesses the unfathomable--and cataclysmic--power of the gods...Now, in the foothills of the Andes, Race's team has arrived--but they're not alone. And soon they'll discover that to penetrate the temple of the idol is to break the first rule of survival.Because some treasures are meant to stay buried..and forces are ready to kill to keep it that way...
Matthew Reilly, 1999.
Temple
Acknowledgements
Special thanks are due to several people this time round.
To Natalie Freer—she is always the first person to read my pages and she reads them in 40-page chunks. Thanks again for your extraordinary patience, generosity and sup port. To my brother, Stephen Reilly—for his unsurpassed loyalty and his razor-sharp comments on the text. (Have I ever mentioned that he has written the best screenplay I have ever read?)
To my parents, as always, for their love, encouragement and support. To my good friend John Schrooten for being the guinea pig for the third time. (John is the first person to read my books in toto—I still remember him reading Ice Station while we were watching a cricket match at the Sydney Cricket Ground.) Also to Nik Kozlina for her early comments on the text and to Simon Kozlina for letting me give the hero of this book his face!
Lastly, mention must be made of the good folk at Pan Macmillan. To Cate Paterson, my publisher, for—well— making all of this possible really. Her endeavours to publish mass-market thriller fiction in this country are unmatched. To Anna McFarlane, my editor, for bringing out the best in me. To every single sales rep at Pan—they're out there, every day, working the front lines in bookstores around the country. And last of all, a very special thank you to Jane Novak, my publicist at Pan, for guarding me like a mother hen and for seeing the irony when Richard Stubbs and I talked about her-our mutual publicist—on national radio!
Well, that's it. Now, on with the show…
INTRODUCTION
From: Holsten, Mark J.
Civilization Lost—The Conquest of the Incas (Advantage Press, New York, 1996)
'CHAPTER I: THE CONSEQUENCES OF CONQUEST
... What cannot be emphasised enough is that the conquest of the Incas by the Spanish conquistadors represents per haps the single greatest collision of cultures in the history of human evolution.
Here was the most dominant seafaring nation on earth— bringing with it all the latest steel technology from Europe —-clashing with the most powerful empire ever to have existed in the Americas.
Unfortunately for historians, and thanks largely to the insatiable gold lust of Francisco Pizarro and his blood thirsty conquistadors, the greatest empire to have irrhabited the Americas is also the one about which we know the least.
The plunder of the Incan empire by Pizarro and his army of henchmen in 1532 must rank as one of the most brutal in written history. Armed with that most overwhelming of colonial weapons—gunpowder—the Spaniards cut a swathe through Incan towns and cities with “a lack of principle that would have made Machiavelli shudder” to use the words of one twentieth-century commentator.
Incan women were raped in their homes or forced to work in filthy makeshift brothels. Men were routinely tor- tured-their eyes would be burned out with hot coals or their tendons cut. Children were shipped to the coast by the hundred, to be loaded onto the dreaded slave galleons and taken back to Europe.
In the cities, temple walls were stripped bare. Gold plates and holy idols were melted into bars before anyone even thought to inquire as to their cultural significance.
Perhaps the most famous of all the tales of quests for Incan treasure is that of Hernando Pizarro—Francisco's brother—and his Herculean journey to the coastal town of Pachacimac in search of a fabled Incan idol. As described by Francisco de Perez in his famous work, the Verdadera relacion de la conquista de la Peru, the riches that Hernando plundered on his march to the temple-shrine at Pachacimac (not far from Lima) are of almost mythic proportions.
From what little remains of the Incan empire buildings that the Spaniards did not destroy, golden relics that the Incas spirited away in the dead of night—the modern historian can only garner the barest of glimpses of a once great civilisation.
What emerges is an empire of paradox.
The Incas did not have the wheel, and yet they built the most extensive road system ever seen in the Americas. They did not know how to smelt iron ore, yet their metalwork with other substances—in particular, gold and silver—was second to none. They had no form of writing, and yet their system of numerical record-keeping—multi-coloured string formations known as a quipus—was incredibly accurate. It was said that the quipucamayocs, the empire's feared tax collectors, would know even when something so small as a sandal went missing.
Inevitably, however, the greatest record of everyday Incan life comes from the Spaniards. As Cortez had done in Mexico only twenty years previously, the conquistadors in Peru brought with them clergymen to spread the Gospel to the heathen natives. Many of these monks and priests would ultimately return to Spain and commit what they saw to writing, and indeed, these manuscripts can still be found in monasteries around Europe today, dated and intact…' !p. 12]
From: de Рerez, Francisco
