At several spots amid the ruins, the drops makes your stomach turn inside out. The topography dances on a Cyclopean scale. And there you stand amid it all, at the heart of this great, once-forgotten arena. Little wonder the Incas revered their mountains as living beings, apus.

They carved the upper edge of the stone at the main temple to echo almost perfectly the surrounding mountains and the river coursing around them. The 'hitching post of the sun', smoothed and weathered, is so deliberate in its shape — yet, at first, it jars with its surroundings. Until, one day at the winter solstice, it all makes sense, and the sun rises to hit the highest stone.

And the 'sacred stone', more a megalith, perhaps seven metres across, three high at its peak, but only one or so thick. At that size, atop this hill, it would be remarkable in itself. Special certainly, sacred perhaps.

But it's only when you stand back, look up, take in the peaks in the distance, that you realise the stone's upper edge echoes the shape of the peak directly adjacent to it — but about a mile away from it. It's not perfect. It's not exact. But it suddenly brings the magic of the place to life. Suddenly, invisible gossamer threads span the gorges, travel miles, centuries, millennia.

Suddenly, you're seeing the rock and the mountain with the eye of the Inca, standing, same as you, gazing to the eastern horizon where the sun limbers into the sky. You're there.
With him, with her. The same sun. The same mountain. The very same stone.

And through that link, that invisible century-spanning filament, you also travel back, inward, to a spiritual place where all is alive — animated with the same life force that drives the sap up the tree, the river to the sea, Man to his grave. The Incas' grasp, their concept of their natural world is irresitible to us urban-bound, aseptic-malled 21st-century tourists. Their affinity with Nature, their mastering of the elements, their spiritual alliances with the forces at work around them, all make you grieve for their lost civilisation — while relishing the small part which we can clasp to us and cherish.

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