My horse descended carefully to this field of the dead. He picked his way across stepping-stones on which pilgrims approached the lower court of the temple where their year of penance before entering was to be spent. A step, and there was the sound of crunching human bones. Sand filled the skull cavities. They shattered like fragile glass as the horse’s hoofs clattered across them toward the ruined city. The sand was pulverized bones. Bits of cloth and pottery attracted the collector’s eye, or a deformed or trephined skull.
The city walls are twenty feet thick. Their ends and their beginnings are lost in sand. Marks of fire show here and there, and traces of forgotten industries. Flights of stairs lead down from the tops of walls, over which was the only entrance. The roofs were made of reeds to let through necessary air and light; none were needed against rain.
Swallows, “dovelets of Santa Rosa,” flew over from the green valley of Lurin. Bats and little owls, always in pairs, inhabited the ruins, and lizards basked in the blinding light and enjoyed the quiet. Under the cactus lying loose upon the ground there is sometimes a small black spider whose bite takes months to cure. Its inhabitants emphasize still further the uninhabitability of this scorching desert.
II
One other center of power confronted the Incas in the coast valleys, the city of Chanchan, belonging to the Chimus.
In the kingdom of the Grand Chimu, Si, the Moon, was worshipped. It appeared both by day and by night, which the sun was not able to do. The Moon raised the tides; did such power not demand sacrifice? On special occasions the Chimus offered to it small children wrapped in brilliant cloths.
The ocean was the medium through which their Moon-god chose to demonstrate its power. As it nourished them with its fish, scattered by the fish-god Pachacamac through its waves, they strewed white meal upon its surface as a form of worship; incidentally to attract a large catch of fish. Ni, the Ocean, symbolized water, the greatest need of a desert land. It was also their only means of communication between the desert valleys, as they plied up and down upon the “silent highway” to collect tribute. Their boats were made of reeds tied together, and they sat upon them as on “horseback, cutting the waves of the sea, and rowing with small reeds on either side,” as Father Acosta explains. Sometimes they had square sails of grass. One may see these boats of bulrushes upon the shore, for they are still in use, their long, curved beaks leaning against each other like stacks of mammoths’ tusks.
The water cult of the Chimu included worship of fountains, flowing streams, and of their goddess, “She of the Emerald Skirts.” The worst criminal was a water thief, he who turned the stream aside from his neighbor’s field; and the Grand Chimu was overcome at last only because the Inca was able to cut off his water supply. Mild Tupac Inca Yupanqui, who ruled the mountains as the Grand Chimu controlled the coast, preferred victory without bloodshed, since his were religious wars to spread the worship of the Sun.
Sun-worshippers and Moon-worshippers, living side by side, struggled in mortal conflict, but the Sun-worshippers prevailed; and when, after a few generations, the Spaniards, eager for bloodshed, came to conquer the Sun-worshippers in the name of Christianity, the great city of the worshippers of Moon and Sea was gone. They could glut their desire only on hidden treasure in sepulchral mounds.
Mochica, the language of the Chimus, was so difficult that no grown person could learn it. Here and there it was spoken as late as the seventeenth century, and to-day near Eten, “where the sun halted at his rising,” there are elements of it left in a curious dialect, spoken by a little community of Indians whom no one can understand. They braid Panama hats of finest straw. Their huts are almost without furniture, they wear no shoes, and dress always in mourning; but they wear flowers in their hair.