The story tells us that in a neighborhood of the city of Cusco there was a big old pine. This tree was in the center of a park and the children played around every day. It was curious because children never touched the tree when they played. It seemed this big old pine hid some secret.
The children went out to play every day from nine in the morning until about five in the afternoon. They returned home tired.
Once, very early in the morning, two brothers went to the park as they lived near it. They saw that the earth was opened near the pine tree and someone entered it. As if by magic, the earth closed again.
Well, they were children. Generally, adults do not believe children. They think they exaggerate and even lie. They say they make things up.
The next day, when the brothers went to play like any other day, they came across something they had never seen before. At the foot of the pine tree a hole was opened and a head came out.
It was an imp. He signaled to them from that distance and cursed so that the children did not come near. The impact on the children was very strong, so much that they did not want to go to the park to play again.
The parents of the children did not know why. They now spent the days and weeks elsewhere until the municipality decided to tear down the tree to build new playground equipment and modernize the park.
The boys were glued to their window to see what happened. Two workers came from the municipality. Already they were preparing a couple of axes to cut down the tree. Suddenly the workers faced trouble as someone began to throw fruit at them from high up in the tree, preventing them from cutting it.
They thought it was a joke in bad taste. They finally managed to cut the tree down and then brought a “tecle”, a kind of pulleys and chains, to pull out what was left of the tree.
The tecle was installed and they started to pull slowly. You could see how the roots of the tree poped out of the ground. Suddenly something strange came out from the roots of the pine and it fled without any straight direction. It was the imp who lived under the pine tree.
The men who were working realized that under the tree there was something else thatwas strange. It was a wooden chest and inside it were gold coins. This was the treasure that the imp guarded. That was why it tormented the children who had discovered it for the first time.
After this event the construction of the modern park was carried out and thanks to the gold coins many other great things were added to it: green areas, pools, benches, and more. Finally, the children went back to the park to play without any fear. They neverheard anything more about that imp.
