The People of Caral

"Now close your eyes," he says. "What do the knots tell you?" Gabriel has made his own quipu like the one they've found in the ruins of Caral. We sit on a hill at the edge of the excavation, desert sand blowing in faint gusts against our faces and arms. Slowly, I finger the first long string, rough cotton tied 17 times and wrapped around a thin stick. Peruvian record keeping, 5,000 years old.
"Anchovies," I say. "Seventeen baskets." And I think of fishermen walking fast from the Pacific, through the heat, through the lush valley, coming to the great stone city to trade salty fish for sweet potatoes and more cotton nets.
Nine smaller knots on the next string. "Flutes made from condor bones." Pure soprano notes rising above the hushed crowds. Tired feet finally at rest. In the cool of the evening, everyone you know, even the priests, gathered in one place, as musicians serenade the heavens themselves.
A bare thread of cotton dangles below the knots on the next string. I think of the river trailing off into the distance, or an irrigation channel dug with stone hoes in the dry earth. Or maybe just emptiness. A people who understood that they were creating their world's first civilization and so left space for the words and numbers they hadn't invented yet.
"I don't know," I tell him. "Nobody knows what these things mean. Do you really think you'll be the one to figure them out?"
"Open your eyes." I see the grey stone huts and the sunken amphitheater in a wasteland of sand and dirt. Beyond them is the Supe Valley, a land that is green, then gold, then green again as new crops grow and acres of yellow corn are laid out to dry. They look like heavy jewels on an ancient body.
Gabriel grew up in a series of shantytowns down the unpaved road. He's never been farther than Lima, and he still grows squash and speckled beans that his grandmother cooks on an open fire.
He holds the quipu up against a sky so wide that there is no scale anymore. The grey Andes are no bigger than the pyramids his ancestors built. The brown knots are a code that hold the whole world.
"I already understand the quipu," he says. "It tells me to remember who my people are."
I think about the crooked little stream that divided the poor half of Caral from the rich. Every day people stepped over it. "In that case," I tell Gabriel. "I understand it too. It's telling me that I'll never forget this place. I'll never forget you."