by Nicholas Asheshov

MAY is off to a warm start in the Sacred Valley, so warm that even though we are within a few weeks of the winter solstice, it seems like summer.

Summery, green-season clouds are still wrapped round the folds of the mountains in the early morning but the snow peaks appear against a blue sky before midday and the bright, clear nights of winter have started. You get a wonderful show, starting regularly at 6 p.m..

The moon, apparently twice the size that it is elsewhere, comes over the mountains to the east like a searchlight. When it`s half or quarter-size, or not yet up, you get a gallery view of thousands of stars. It`s a planetarium and the Incas and their predecessors thought of it that way, too.

The Incas saw the Sacred Valley, which is separated from Cusco by the high rolling farmland and llama pastures of the Chinchero massif, as the reflection of the Milky Way.

The Valley, at 9,000 feet a.s.l., with what`s known as an Andean sub-tropical climate, was literally heaven on Earth, and for the Incas, sons of the Sun no less, this was home. Cold, complex Cusco, at 11,400 ft a.s.l., was the political capital, where they went to work.

It was from the temple-pyramid at Ollantaytambo, in the heart of the Valley, that the Ayar Brothers, the Inca founding fathers, had emerged, according to new research by my chum Edgar Elorrieta, born and bred in Urubamba. Edgar is perhaps the most knowledgeable person alive about the stars and their movements in this part of the Andes. He spends his week-end nights gazing at the stars and trying to line them up with ancient towers and ruins.

One of Edgar`s aims is to souse out the direct, mystic connection between the Ancients and the stars, the Gods, that was destroyed by the conquistadores four and a half centuries ago.

As well as star-gazing he listens to the indians who live up in the side-valleys and highland districts where at least part of the tradition has been kept alive in the form of creation myths, and stories about the connections between animals, plants, mountains, men, women, the ancestors, the sun, the moon and the stars.

Edgar is no romantic New Age visionary into past and future lives. He is the only person in the Sacred Valley who hasn`t got excited about UFOs --Sky Brothers, as the shaman set nicely calls them-- in his tens of thousands of sky-gazing hours, though he has occasionally seen some lights zigging and zagging across the night sky that were clearly not aircraft or satellites.

The skies are so clear and as it were pro-active that even I have seen a UFO here. It was a green and red pair of lights floating a few thousand feet above the river during the first hour of darkness, before the bar was open, to answer your next question. The local chief of police saw it as did a pile of other Urubamba residents. It didn`t move or do anything exciting so we all got bored and drifted off.

UFOs or not, even the most down-to-earth visitor senses quickly that this is a special place. They know, partly because they can see it in front of them, that they are in the heart of several millenia of history, the history not just of the Incas and their predecessors but of civilization itself. The splendid road networks up, down and across these huge ranges at almost superhuman heights, the literally incredible ruins and the massive agricultural terraces are among the great human achievements, something, here in the Valley, we can see, touch and think about every day.

I try and remind myself of these deep thoughts every time I take it upon myself to tick off one of our employees for not sweeping here or not cleaning there. Most of them are descendents of the people who not only managed these feats of engineering but had a Copernican grasp of astronomy a thousand years before Copernicus himself, Newton and Galileo.

The main cities and temples, it seems, were designed to represent some of the groupings of the stars and the planets. The great Temple of the Sun at Ollantaytambo was done in the shape of a llama and the town itself and its terraces and cliffs, a Tree of Life. The complex at Pisaq was a condor --all this according to Edgar-- perhaps in the same way that we refer to the Southern Cross, the Great Bear and Orion's Belt.

One of the most impressive sights in the Andes is the moment just after first light on the day of the winter solstice, June 21, when a first sharp ray of sun-light suddenly hits a walled tennis-court-sized section of the Ollantaytambo Pyramid. A few moments later another ray picks out another walled section of the ruin.

It`s a show and it`s dramatic. It was clearly carefully-designed and planned hundreds or thousands of years ago by people who had an extraordinary grasp of architecture, engineering, astronomy --all things that we can understand and appreciate-- together with a highly-developed social, political and religious sensibility --all things that we no longer have.

Other dimensions, and levels of relationships and probabilities exist, our own physicists tell us. Anyone visiting the Sacred Valley has no difficulty in sensing that the people who lived here in the distant past had their own grasp of relativity and quantum knowledge.

Edgar Elorrieta, smoking his way through two packs of Marlboro`s a night out in the cold, clear Andes, has already deepened our horizon. Here in the Valley on a winter night, anyone can look up and make their own connections.

If they`re lucky and that way inclined, they may even spot an Inca Sky Brother.

©Nicholas Asheshov, Urubamba Cusco Peru