Tiahuanacu was made by a race which as far antedates the Incas as they the dominant race to come. Everything to do with it is remote and forgotten. Of necessity even its name is modern, having been given by the Inca Yupanqui to his “resting-place.” The great pillars of the City of the Phoenix rise from the roof of the world, “as strong and as freshly new as the day when they were raised upon these frozen heights by means which are a mystery.” Single stones measure thirty feet in length. Heads of huge statues lie about and hard black stones difficult to hew, the corners as sharp as when chiseled before the memory of man. Niches and doorways are cut from the middle of single blocks, whose corners are perfect right angles.
Many finely sculptured stones are now used for grinding chocolate, some of the larger ones for making railroads. Prehistoric idols lean as doorkeepers against flimsy, modern walls in the almost deserted modern town, and one weird face has found its way as far as the Alameda in La Paz. Beyond the protecting opening of a still perfect monolith lies the burial-place for still-born Christian children.
A monolithic doorway, beautifully sculptured, lies broken in two by lightning. A square-headed, legless, impenetrable god, speaking from right-angled lips, still stares from behind his square eyelids. Weeping three square tears from each eye, he surveys the waste and desolation about him, just as he looked unmoved upon the golden pageants of Inca days that did him honor as a superhuman deity who had sprung into being in one night with a whole city about him. His hands wield snaky-necked scepters, each the head of a condor, the lightning bird; and rows of square little worshippers in wings and condor-fringes kneel beneath crowns of rays fading off into the heads of birds with reversed combs.
No one yet knows the meaning of the sculptured deity which confused Inca amautas (wise men) a thousand years ago. Though the Creator is supposed to have lived in Tiahuanacu, an eminent German, Rudolph Falb, says the weeping god is a hero of the flood, his tears the symbol of the deluge.
A tradition of the sixteenth century ascribes these monuments to an age before the appearance of the sun in the heavens. Their builders were destroyed by a flood sent by the wrathful god, Con Tici Uiracocha, who came from the south, converting “heights into plains and plains into tall heights, causing springs to flow out of bare rocks.” Half in regret that he had destroyed his race of men, he created sun and moon to render visible the waste he had made.
This information is as accurate and authentic as any which a long line of distinguished explorers and archeologists have been able to substitute for it. Men of sane judgment agree in admitting that there is nothing to justify any conclusion. But they also agree that the significance of Tiahuanacu exceeds everything hitherto discovered in Peru. It recalls Carnac and Philae. It stands with the dolmens of Brittany, Stonehenge, and the cyclopean terraces of the South Sea Islands, as a great riddle of human history.
A GOD OF TIAHUANACU.