Children of the Sun

High in the Andes, where the air thins and the mountains scrape the sky, a small kingdom in the valley of Cusco became, in barely a century, the largest empire the Americas had ever known. The Inca called it Tawantinsuyu - "the four parts together" - and it stretched more than three thousand miles down the spine of a continent, binding ten million people into a single dazzling machine that ran without money, without markets, without the wheel, without iron, and without a single written word. In Children of the Sun, E.B Cohen tells the whole sweep of that world - not just its swift and violent end, but the astonishing civilization the Spanish found waiting for them. Here are the world-shaking emperor Pachacuti, who defeated an invading army and then rebuilt the world in stone; the knotted-cord accountants who ran an empire from memory; the relay runners who carried fresh fish to the mountains and messages faster than a horse; the engineers who terraced the mountainsides and married stone to stone without mortar so tightly a knife-blade cannot enter; and the dead emperors who kept their palaces, their servants, and their votes in the councils of the living. And here, wreathed in cloud on its knife-edge ridge, is Machu Picchu - not a lost city or a last refuge, as legend has it, but the private mountain estate of an emperor, its real story stranger and more human than the myth. Cohen tells how it was built, who lived in it, why it was abandoned, and how it came back to the world in 1911. Then comes the fall: the smallpox that ran ahead of the sails, the civil war between two royal brothers, the one hundred and sixty-eight Spaniards who walked into an empire of millions, and the ransom room heaped with gold that bought a captive emperor nothing but time. Sweeping, humane, and grounded in the latest archaeology and the voices of the Andes themselves, this is the complete and gripping story of how a people built a world above the clouds - and how that world came to an end, yet never entirely died.