Adobe Walls at Gran-Chimú.
Decorations at Gran-Chimú.
The ruins of Gran-Chimú, in the vicinity of Truxillo, cover an area of three quarters of a league, and beyond these limits are seven or eight great enclosures with adobe walls, in some of which are conical mounds, or huacas, and some traces of buildings. The two principal structures, called palaces, are surrounded by walls one hundred and forty feet high, sixteen feet thick at the base, but tapering to three or four feet at the top. Round one of the palaces the wall is double, as shown by the section in the cut. The English translation of Rivero, instead of surrounding one of the palaces with a double wall like the original, represents one wall as being twice as high and thick as the other. These walls, like all the structures of Gran-Chimú, are of adobes nine by eighteen inches, resting on a foundation of rough stones laid in clay. In connection with the larger palace is a square containing apartments, the walls of which are a conglomerate of gravel and clay, smooth, and whitewashed on the interior. There are also plazas and streets regularly laid out, and a reservoir which by a subterranean aqueduct was supplied with water from the Rio Moche two miles distant. This palace—and by palace, a group of edifices within an enclosure, rather than a single edifice, seems to be meant—has two entrances, one in the middle of each long side. The second palace is one hundred and twenty five yards further east, and is also divided by squares and narrow streets. At one end is the huaca of Misa, surrounded by a low wall, pierced by galleries and rooms in which have been found mummies, cloths, gold and silver, implements, and a wooden idol with pieces of pearl-shell. All the inner walls are built of a mass of clay and gravel or of adobes. The cut shows specimens of the ornamentation, which seem to bear outwardly a slight resemblance to the mosaic work of Mitla, although the method of their construction is not explained. "Outside of these notable edifices, there is an infinite number of squares and small houses, some round and others square, which were certainly dwellings of the lower classes, and whose great extent indicates that the population must have been very large." Among the ruins are many truncated conical mounds, or huacas, of fine gravel, from some of which interesting relics and large quantities of gold have been taken. The so-called Temple of the Sun is three quarters of a league east of the city near Moche, in connection with which are several adobe structures, one of them, perhaps the temple itself, so far as may be determined by Rivero's vague account, made worse than vague in the English translation, is a regular pyramid of adobes. It is four hundred and fourteen by four hundred and thirty feet at the base, three hundred and forty-five feet wide on the summit, and over eighty feet high, built in terraces, pierced with a gallery through the centre, and affording a fine view of the sea and the city of Truxillo.
RUINS OF HUANUCO.
