The Incas chose it for an empire’s emblem and dedicated to it a temple close to that of the Sun.
It symbolized to the Spaniards the astounding country which had fallen as by miracle into their grasp, the land of mystery, whose romantic wealth and dazzling promises encircled them as with the rainbow arch, and, like it, receded as they advanced.
Peru still keeps the rainbow symbol. Many-colored mysteries hover about the man who leans over its glittering jewel-casket. And wherever the ends of its bright bow touch the desert, flit over the mountain-tops, or sweep across the jungle, nature’s unexplored secrets lie concealed.
There is, however, a difference. For the rainbow-arch which mingles sunlight and water is only an evanescent promise, vanishing almost as quickly as it can flash a new gleam of hope into a human heart. But Peru, with its changing beauties and its mysterious allurements, is a fact. The pot of gold which it promises is real.
THE END
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Of all the general works on Peru none has greater weight than Peru; Beobachtungen und Studien (1893) by E. W. Middendorf. He has exploited the country in a large, three-volume work with such German thoroughness that hardly a fact has been left for subsequent writers to disclose. I have referred to it constantly. Other shorter, general studies of the country are Von Tschudi’s Reisen durch Südamerika, giving much attention to folk-lore, and Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825) by W. B. Stevenson, secretary to Lord Cochrane. He traveled far and wide in Peru and made observations in regard to remote details. Typical of descriptive writings is Two Years in Peru (1876) by T. J. Hutchinson. Various general works by Bernard Moses and his publications in the University of California Chronicle are valuable, notably his work on the produce of the mines.
Reliable observations on ruins are those made by E. G. Squier in his Peru: Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas, by Mariano Rivero y Juan de Tschudi in Antiguedades Peruanas, and by Charles Wiener in Pérou et Bolivie. Studies of ruins in particular localities have been made by many archaeologists; for example, on Tiahuanacu, L. Angrand, in Antiquités Américaines, though his book is now out of date, Adolph F. Bandelier in his Islands of Titicaca and Koati, Max Uhle, with whom I visited some of the ruins, on Tiahuanacu and Pachacamac, and Hiram Bingham in recent explorations.
Sir Clements Markham has spent more than fifty years studying every stage of Peru’s history from the time when it was a land of myth to the Chilian war. His researches as well as his careful translations have been published in a series of volumes. Authorities on various periods of the history are legion. Relating to pre-Inca times, in which studies of myths and theories of ruins are intermingled, original sources are the Memorias Historiales of Montesinos, first published in French in 1840, and Cieza de Leon, the soldier, whose Crónica del Perú (1553) is authority on the Incas. Some modern scientists who have written about the pre-Inca period are Ernest Desjardins in his Pérou avant la Conquête Espagnole, Tylor’s Primitive Culture, Meyen’s Uber die Ureinwohner von Peru, and Brinton in his Myths of the New World and other works. Many persons are studying the legends, as, for instance, Professor Liborio Zerda of the University at Bogotá. The Miscelaneas Australes of Miguel Cavello Balboa, a soldier, is an original source for knowledge of the remote Chimus. Das Reich der Chimus by Otto von Buchwald, and especially Das Muchik oder die Chimu Sprache by Doctor Middendorf, who quotes largely from Calancha and Carrera, are modern authorities.