"Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial."

When we decided to attempt a QTVR panorama of the flanks of Cayambe, where the equator passes at its highest earthly elevation, it was little more than a whim, a cool thing to do that might connect the Net surfer with a unique point on Earth. In passing, I wondered if there weren't more to it than mere whimsy, or if the millennia-old history of humanity in Ecuador this point might have some great significance of its own. Today, I found my answer.

Rocco and I went off on our separate itineraries this morning, she toward the headwaters of the Amazon, I on a journey southward toward the old Inca capital at Tomebamba. My trip south begins tomorrow, hers this morning, so after we bid "hasta la vista" this morning I traveled with Oswaldo Munoz, director of the Ecuadorian Ecotourism Association, back one more time toward El Mitad del Mundo.

Oswaldo and I met a few days earlier, at the Hotel Sebastian, our hospitable base in Quito. We are both about the same age, bearded, with two children, and as he drove the chaotic roads north we found our paths had crossed many times before. His eco-tour company Nuevo Mundo had been the land operator for several programs I helped promote, first for Sobek Expeditions and later for a spin-off incentive tour company, World Heritage Travel Group. Aside from the World Heritage program to Ecuador, another was to Oaxaca, Mexico, an "archaeo-astronomy" trip that centered around the total eclipse of the sun on July 11, 1992. The Oaxaca eclipse had sparked my interest in the ancient astronomical and calendrical sciences of the New World, as evidenced at Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, and other pre-Columbian sites in Mesoamerica. Now, Oswaldo and I were headed to the Solar Museum a couple of kilometers along the equatorial line from El Mitad del Mundo. Oswaldo had been the curator of this novel museum since the death of its founder, Prof. Luciano Andrade Marin, in the early 1970s.

Before we reached the museum, Oswaldo turned off into the high hills above the Mitad del Mundo complex, the ostentatious monument Rocco and I had visited earlier. We drove into the mountains to overlook a fantastically verdant landscape, the crater of an ancient volcano called Pululahua. In the flat floor of the crater, a checkerboard of green verified the fertile nature of the soil, a ridge away from the drier lands of the main inter-Andean valley. But Oswaldo directed my attention to a pair of peaks known as La Marca, stretching to the east along a line just 5 kilometers north of El Mitad. These peaks, he explained, were called La Marca because they marked where the equator once was, two thousand years ago. Due to the wobble of the earth on its axis, these peaks were on the line itself: the line where the sun casts no shadow at noon on the equinox dates in March and September.

The solar museum itself is a small rose colored building on a small lot in the town of San Antonio, its grounds overgrown by grasses and a plethora of plants. The building is constructed in an odd T-shape, aligned along the equator, the long narrow ramp of the T pointing east, toward the sunrise. On the north side of the building, a stucco polar bear signifies the Boreal; on the south side, our friend the penguin represents the Austral. I was struck by an odd sense of inevitability, that TerraQuest should venture so easily from one end of the Southern Hemisphere to its farthest extent -- where a single step could take me across that line into the other side of the Earth.

Prof. Andrade Marin had built the museum with the kind of obsessive attention to detail that marks either the scientist or the madman. A window on the north side was targeted on the Pole Star: on the south the corresponding window opened to the Southern Cross. A narrow glass roof along the axis of the building, and thus the equator (marked here by an alabaster line, not the red paint found at El Mitad), cast a line of sunlight all day long at the angle of the sun's angle off the equinox, changing every day of the year, illuminating the alabaster line fully only on the equinox. In the middle of the room hung an old school globe, its geography in Spanish, aligned so that on the equinox the sun would fall on it evenly, just as the larger world outside was struck by the rays of that star 93 million miles distant in the very same way. It was as if inside the strange walls of this small building the cosmos itself was represented, and represented with a kind of alchemical accuracy.

Displays of pre-Hispanic artifacts gave convincing evidence that the Quitu, the pre-Hispanic people of the equator -- for whom Quito is named -- knew what the equator was, and had legends and technologies to prove it. An elaborate chart showed the inferential relationship between the "Equitus" and the Egyptians, with similarities in language and architecture that pointed to strange mysteries beneath the horizon of science. The pyramids, for instance, are elaborations on a three-sided structure in three dimensions; one-third of the way up the pyramid, the pharaohs were buried, and mummified by the energies of the structure. The tombas, tombs, of the Quitu were truncated pyramids -- cut off a third of the way up, dispensing with the unnecessary two-thirds of elaboration. The strange linguistic relationship of many of the world's languages was explored, too, especially the use of the letter "T" and its relationship to tombs, temples, the burial mounds called tula, and too many more to remember. I added my own bit of mystery: the Toraja of Sulawesi call the ceremonial statues of their dead tau-tau. Oswaldo nodded in knowing appreciation.

When we went outside, I realized the strange shape of the museum was the shape of the tula, the long axis a ramp leading to the third-pyramid burial mound itself. Oswaldo, pointing out plants from around the world growing in this equatorial garden, where all seasons are equal, and every day is all seasons. The prize of this garden is the solar chronometer, one of only three built over 100 years ago by an Italian scientist (or madman, I was unsure by this point) which tells the precise time of day, as well as the day of the month throughout the year. It is a fine brass instrument which casts a pinpoint of light on the path of the elliptic engraved on an elegant tongue. The path of the elliptic is, as we all know, a figure eight... like the symbol for infinity... like the Quitu symbol of the sun.

Oswaldo covered up key displays with plastic sheeting before we left, and removed the solar chronometer from its base and hid it; leakage, disrepair and vandalism threatened the life's work of Andrade Marin. As we left San Antonio, he pointed out the barely discernible ruins of Rumicucho on a distant hill. This was a solar observatory, also built on the ancient equator, five kilometers to the north of the current line. He told me then of another site known as Cochasqui, still farther to the east, where the T-shaped tombs of unknown kings were aligned along the ancient line. I could feel the earth revolve beneath my feet, and see the sky sweep grandly to either pole equally, spreading out from the equator like a vast wingspan.

Before we left this magic zone, we stopped by El Mitad del Mundo again -- though not at the tall obelisk capped by its enormous globe, but at a strange outdoor museum called Intinyan, the Path of the Sun. Here replicas of traditional Quitu, Quichua and Shuar dwellings show how the indigenous people live; here the director, Fabian Vera, wears a feather headdress, holding a hunting spear in one hand and an authentic shrunken head in the other. And here, also on display, are replicas of the points along the ancient path of the sun, the equator of antiquity: the peaks of La Marca, the observatories of Rumicucho and the tombs of Cochasqui, and a final pre- historic site: an enormous cylinder on the edge of Cayambe, a tall empty circular tower where at noon on the solar equinox, no shadow is cast with the enclosed circle.

Two thousand years ago, when these marked the center of the world for the Quitu, the equator itself passed directly through the 4000-meter summit of Cayambe, the final station along the path of the sun.

-- Christian Kallen

 

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