Huge, pyramid-like mud structures spring crumbling from the soil whose modified form they seem to be, temples and palaces of former days, each with its legend. The ruins are inhabited by weird iguanas and “haunted by those birds of ill omen that only nest in ruins.” Mounds of treasure, too, linger along the desert, and fragments of the paved road of the Incas.
A gold bell was once buried in Tambo de Mora. Older people have heard it tolling on quiet nights. Some say it rings from the top of a hill, some, from beneath the ground. To be sure, bells were not known to ancient Peruvians, yet a company was properly financed to hunt for this bell of gold.
Submerged or enchanted cities exist on every hand. A mystic race of dwarfs live in the Andes. They guard a vault of buried treasure. An Indian who declared he had seen it became so terrified at the extent of the riches that he fled, not forgetting to mark his path. Yet frequently as he had followed the trail to the very spot, he could never again find the cavern of glittering jewels: it had sunk completely out of sight—“You can see for yourself, Señorita, that it has, if I take you there!”
Legends of prehistoric days take on the garb of myth, when giants came over the sea to Peru long before the memory of man. Wishing to provide themselves with water in the desert, they excavated enormously deep wells, still undeniable evidence of their dominion. Moreover, their bones of incredible size have been found. Garcilasso says a piece of one hollow tooth weighs more than half a pound. Their footprints have been traced as far as Patagonia. For their sin they were destroyed by a rain of fire.
Maui, too,—the Polynesian god who caught the sun with cords of cocoanut fiber, who lifted the sky and smoothed its arched surface with his stone adze, who made the earth habitable for man and then created him, and who now divides his time between fishing for islands with a hook which is called the Plume of Beauty, and resting in the form of a small day-fly upon the under side of a flower,—Maui, who belongs to the length and breadth of the Pacific, once visited Peru.
Upon this coast lived aborigines with flat noses, fishing from boats of inflated sealskins, and sleeping pell-mell in sealskin huts on heaps of seaweed, “tall, cannibalistic fishermen ... who used bone utensils, made primitive pottery, nets, and fabrics of osier.”
Here lived the contemporaries of the Incas, Yuncas they were called, “dwellers in the hot lowlands,” distinct from those of the highlands, with their hideous thoughts painted on earthenware jars, and their hazy conception of a single god, their pragmatic worship of him by means of anything which he had made for their support and comfort, and their sacrifice to him of his greatest gift, human beings.
Fancy is free to play along geologic or human history. Bones of mastodons as well as sea-bottom shells are found in the desert. Vanished races have embellished it in passing. Man has but added to the mystery of nature. Yet after such lapses of time the two are mingled indistinguishably.
CHAPTER III
DESERT PERSPECTIVE
There was once a mine of gold in Peru. Later it became a copper mine, and now they sell the water that collects in the bottom.