Loneliness is the condor’s only friend.
The wind howls through his broadened wings.
CHAPTER II
A MEGALITHIC CITY AND A SACRED LAKE
I
There is something more mysterious than the sea, and that is the desert; something more mysterious than the desert, and that is the mountains; something more mysterious than the mountains, and that is the jungle. Yet there is something with a deeper mystery than all—the tradition of a great race that has struggled to a climax and subsided.
Where is there a more unbridled ocean? Where a more pitiless desert? Where other Andes? Where so limitless a jungle? And where, in the history of the whole world, so picturesque a dynasty—whose god was the Sun, whose insignia the rainbow, who dwelt in houses lined with gold, who tamed the earth’s resources so that their aqueducts in a rainless land are still ministering to the descendants of a people who destroyed them, and who left not one written word to testify that they had ever been created at all.
What can be said of the Incas, the theme of romance ever since the greed of the Spaniard reduced them to a legend—romances pale indeed beside facts recorded by sober historians? A people who used copper for iron, quipus for writing, llamas for horses; who sacrificed condors and humming-birds to their gods on the frozen plains; whose accumulations of precious metals exceeded stories of Ophir’s wealth; whose ears were enlarged that they might better hear the complaints of the oppressed, and who were brought to destruction by a handful of adventurers whom the whole training of the people had led them to worship as gods.
Yet the Incas were only the final stage in a series of races that flourished on the heights of Peru back through the ages. They were but the last flicker of a guttering civilization without a name, which has left only a few silent ruins built by unknown peoples, of whom these “symptoms of architecture” reveal to us the forgotten existence. The mystery that fires our imagination in contemplating the Incas had shrouded their predecessors from them with an impenetrable veil.
Humboldt once remarked that the problem of the first population of America is no more the province of history than questions on the origin of plants and animals are part of natural science. In considering this megalithic age, we have to do with pure speculation, not with any legitimate domain of knowledge. Learned treatises end only with a question. Dr. Bingham has recently discovered among these mountains glacial human bones, possibly twenty thousand to forty thousand years old. They may shed new light upon the identity of the makers of those mysterious terraces which appear coeval with the creation of the world.
Vestiges of past civilizations are everywhere about, “monuments which themselves memorials need;” terraces hollowed out of the mountains to the very summits, bits of stone walls, roads, aqueducts, or an occasional stone idol with a shallow vessel for the blood of victims, perhaps a staring face on a pillar with projecting tusks and snakes intertwined on its cheeks.