"Beautiful beyond exaggeration," is how one Spanish chronicler described Tanta Carhua. Carhua was a ten-year old Inca child whose father offered her to the Inca Emperor as a Capacocha sacrifice.

The Inca Empire once stretched 2,500 miles along the Andes of western South America. At its height, it was one of the largest empires in the world and, in geographic terms, the most extensive ...