The rock is composed of a light yellowish brown rather hard sandstone of carboniferous age, with a slaty cleavage. The back of the ridge is convex, and is easily climbed. From it the ground falls rapidly to the lake, about three hundred feet below. Except for what may possibly be an artificial incision at the top, the rock appears to be entirely in its natural state, the cave-like hollow at its base shewing no sign of man's handiwork. Neither does any existing building touch it. There are, however, traces of walls enclosing the space in front of it, especially on the north side, where there seems to have been a walled-in enclosure; and there are other ancient remains hard by. The only one of these sufficiently preserved to enable us to conjecture its purpose is a somewhat perplexing two-storied edifice, resembling, though less large and handsome, that which I have described as existing on the island of Koati. It is called the Chingana, or Labyrinth, and doubtless dates from Inca times, as it contains niches and other features characteristic of the architecture of that period. The numerous rooms are small, scantily lighted, and connected by narrow passages. A few flowers had rooted on the top of the walls, and I found tufts of maidenhair fern nestling in the moist, dark corners within. All the roofs have perished. There is nothing to suggest a place of worship, so probably the building contained the quarters provided for the various attendants on the religious rites performed here, and perhaps also for the women who were kept near many sanctuaries and palaces for the service of the Sun and the Incas. None of the other ruins is identifiable as a temple, so we are left in doubt whether any temple that may have existed was destroyed by the zeal of the Spanish Conquerors, or whether the worship of the Sun and the local spirits was conducted in the open air in front of the Rock, whose surface was, according to some rather doubtful authorities, covered with plates of gold and silver. In front of the Rock there lies a flat stone which it has been conjectured may have been used for sacrifices. All our authorities agree that the place was most sacred. Some say no one was allowed to touch it; and at it oracles were delivered, which the Spaniards accepted as real, while attributing them to devils who dwelt inside the rock. Of the many legends relating to the place only two need be mentioned. One is that here the Sun, pitying the barbarous and wretched condition of men, took his two children, Manco Capac and Mama (mother) Occlo, and giving them a short staff or wand of gold, directed them to go forward, till they should find a place where the staff on being struck against the ground entered and stuck fast. They travelled to the north for many days, and the wand finally entered the earth at Cuzco, where they accordingly built a city and founded their dominion, Manco being the first of the Inca dynasty. The other tale is that for a long, long time there was darkness over the earth and great sorrow among men till at last the Sun suddenly rose out of the Rock on Titicaca, which was thenceforward sacred and a place of sacrifice and oracles. Other traditions, more or less differing from these in details, agree in making Titicaca the original home of the Incas, and one of them curiously recalls a Mexican story by placing on it a great foreign Teacher whom the Spaniards identified with St. Thomas the Apostle.[29] In these stories, some written down by Spanish explorers or treasure seekers at the time of the Conquest or collected subsequently by learned ecclesiastics, some still surviving, with grotesque variations, in the minds of the peasantry, we may distinguish three salient points,—first, the veneration for the Rock as an object; secondly, its close relation to Sun worship; and thirdly, its connection with the Inca rulers of Cuzco. It is a plausible view that from ancient pre-Inca times the Rock was a Huaca or sacred object (in fact a fetish, i.e. an object inhabited by a spirit) to the primitive tribes of the island and lake coasts, as the cleft rock of Delphi was to the Greeks, even as the Black Stone which they called the Mother of the gods was to the Phrygian worshippers of Cybele, as perhaps the Stone of Tara—perhaps even the Lia Fail or Coronation Stone of Scone and now of Westminster Abbey—was to our Celtic ancestors. When the Incas established their dominion over the region round the lake they made this spot a sanctuary of the sun, following their settled policy of superadding the imperial religion of Sun worship—the Sun being their celestial progenitor—to the primitive veneration and propitiation of local spirits which their subjects practised. It was thus that the Roman Emperors added the worship of the goddess of Rome to that of the local deities of Western Asia and Africa and set up to her great temples, like that at Pergamos, among and above the older shrines. If there be truth in the legend that the Incas were themselves originally a tribe of the Collas of the plateau who quitted their former seats to go northward to the conquest of Cuzco, it would be all the more natural for them to honour this sanctuary as an ancient home of their race.
The isle seems to have been abandoned and the worship forbidden soon after the Conquest. No Christian church was ever placed near it, as might have been done if it were deemed necessary to wean the people from rites still practised there. What the early Spanish chroniclers tell us of the devotion paid to it is amply confirmed by the religious ornaments and the numerous objects connected with worship which have been dug up near the Rock, including woollen ponchos of extraordinary fineness of workmanship and colour, and golden figures of men (or deities) and of llamas, the llama being a sacred animal like the bull in Egypt. The native Indians still approach the Rock with awe. Lightning and Thunder, as well as the Sun and the local spirits were worshipped, and human sacrifices, frequently of children, were offered. Standing on this lonely spot one thinks of what it may have witnessed in old days. What weird dances and wild uproar of drums and pipes before the Rock, and still wilder songs and cries of frenzied worshippers! What shrieks of victims from the Stone of Sacrifice! Now all is silence, and nothing, except the crumbling ruins of the Chingana, speaks of the past. No sound except the sighing of the breeze round the cliff and the splash of the wavelets as they break on the pebbly beach beneath. There is no habitation near. The green outlying islets, one of which is said to have run with the blood of human sacrifices, are all desolate. The villages on the Bolivian shore to the east and the Peruvian shore to the west are too distant to be visible, while to the north the vast expanse of glittering blue stretches out till the blue depths of heaven bend to meet it.
Bidding farewell to the Island of the Sun, we sailed southward through the Straits of Tiquina, only half a mile wide, which connect the principal lake with the shallower gulf at its southeastern end, called the Lake of Vinamarca. On each side of the channel between heights whose igneous rocks seemed to indicate volcanic action are picturesque little Indian villages, St. Paul on the southwestern, St. Peter on the northeastern shore. It was market day, and the balsas were carrying the peasants homeward. I have already referred to these raft-like boats, formed of bundles of Totora tied together, and equipped with a small mast carrying a sail also of the same kind of rush. There were only passengers upon these, but the rushes are so much lighter than water that they can support a considerable weight. Large blocks of building stone are often carried on them. The Indians were kneeling on them and paddling, one on each side. Progress was slow, but in this country time is no object; it is almost the only thing of which there is more than enough in Bolivia.
We had now got nearer to the great Cordillera Real, the range of unbroken snow and ice which runs southward from the village of Sorata nearly to the city of La Paz, and could better make out the several peaks and the passes which separate them and the splendid glaciers which stream down their hollows far below the line of perpetual snow. Eight or nine great masses can be distinguished, the loftiest and northernmost of which, Illampu, is nearly 22,000 feet high, the rest ranging from 19,000 to 21,000.
Illampu consists of two peaks and is the mountain which European travellers and maps call Sorata, from the town of that name near its northern base. It consists of two peaks, the higher of snow, called by the natives, Hanko Uma,[30] and the slightly lower one, of rock, Illampu proper. This, which is the loftiest of the range, and was sixty or seventy years ago believed to be the loftiest in the western hemisphere, was climbed by Sir Martin Conway, who has described his ascent and his other adventures in Bolivia, in a very interesting book,[31] but he found the last slope just below the top so unstable, owing to the powdery condition of the snow, that he was obliged to turn back. So far as I know, no other summit of the range, unless Illimani is to be accounted a part of it, has ever been ascended. At the end of the chain the splendid pyramid of Kaka Aka, also called Huayna Potosi, seems to approach 21,000. After it the range sinks a little till it rises again fifty miles farther south to over 21,000 feet in the snowy summit of Illimani. The Aymarás seem to have no special names for most of these peaks, and when asked for one answer that it is Kunu Kollu (a snow height).[32] That is the case in many other mountainous countries. Neither in the White Mountains of North America nor in the Rockies and Cascades do the aborigines seem to have had names for more than a few separate peaks. Names were not needed, for they seldom approached the great heights. On the other hand, in Scotland and Ireland every hill has its Gaelic name because the herdsmen had occasion to traverse them. In the Tatra Mountains of Northern Hungary almost the only names of peaks are those taken from villages near their foot. Here the tract at the foot of the range is desert; nobody, unless possibly a hunter now and then pursuing a vicuña, has any reason for approaching it.
The Cordillera Real is not of volcanic origin, though there may be recent eruptive rocks here and there in it. None of the great summits shew the forms characteristic of the volcano, and my friend Sir M. Conway tells me that all the rocks he saw seemed to be granite and gneiss or mica schist, or perhaps very old palæozoic strata. The region has been very little explored. There must be some superb glacier passes across it.
The scenery of this lake of Vinamarca, which we were now traversing, has a grand background in the Snowy Range, but the foreground is unlike that of Titicaca, for the shores are mostly low, shallow bays covered with water plants, over which flocks of lake fowl flutter, with the hills softer in outline than those of the great lake, though stranger and more varied in colour, for black masses of volcanic rock rise on the north and bare hills of a deep red on the southwest. Here is the point where the river Desaguadero flows out and a little to the east is the port of Guaqui whence runs the railway to La Paz. Here we halted for the night, a very cold one, and set off in a cold morning for the Bolivian capital. An open valley runs south between flat-topped stony ridges affording thin pasturage, past clusters of Indian huts; and after some few miles, we see huge blocks of stone scattered over a wide space of almost level ground. These are the last ruins I have to mention, and in some respects they form the most remarkable group of prehistoric structures not only in the Andean countries, but in the Western Hemisphere. I will not attempt to describe them, for they are too numerous and too chaotic, but only to convey some impression of the more significant objects. The place is Tiahuanaco, or Tihuamacu, as the Indians of the neighbourhood call it.
The configuration of the ground, and the remains of what seems to have been an ancient mole for the landing of boats, suggest that in remote ages the waters of the lake came close up to this spot, though it is now five miles distant. I have already remarked that the character of the western and northern shores of Titicaca, as well as Indian traditions that places now far from the shore were once approachable by water, seem to indicate that the lake has receded within historical times and may be still receding. The ruins are scattered over a very large area, but those of most interest are to be found within a space of about half a square mile, the rest being mostly detached and scattered blocks to which it is hard to assign any definite plan or purpose. Within this space three deserve special notice. One is a huge, oblong mound of earth, about fifty feet high, with steep sides supported by stone walls. It has been called the Fortress, but there are now no traces of defensive ramparts, and it may have been raised for a palace or, more probably, for some religious purpose. That it was a natural hill seems unlikely. There are no remains on it of any large and solid building and in the middle there is now a hollow, its bottom filled with water, which is said to have been dug out by those who have excavated here, in old days for treasure, and more recently for archæological purposes. Its vast proportions and the fine cutting of the stones which are placed along the edges are evidences of the great amount of labour employed upon it.
A little below the mound are the remains of a broad staircase of long, low steps of sandstone, well cut, standing between two pillars of hard diorite rock. These led up to a platform, on which a temple may have stood. The proportions of the staircase and the pillars are good, and the effect is not without stateliness. No fragments of the supposed temple remain, but on the platform there are many stone figures, some found on it, some brought from the ground beneath and placed here, heads of animals, condors and other birds, pumas and fishes, all forcibly, though rudely, carved. Still more notable is a human head surmounting a square pillar or pedestal. It is much damaged, and no wonder, for the Bolivian soldiers used it as a mark to shoot at; but though the execution is stiff, the head has a certain dignity. Two other human figures, sadly defaced, stand at the gate of the village churchyard, a mile away. The style of all these is said to bear some resemblance to the remarkable colossal figures found on Easter Island, which lies out in the Pacific, two thousand miles west of Chile, and which are evidently the work of some race that inhabited that isle in ages of which no record remains.
The most striking object, however, is the monolithic sculptured gateway, which now stands alone, the building of which it formed a part having perished. It is hewn out of one block of dark grey trachytic rock, is ten feet high, the doorway or aperture four and a half feet high from the ground and two feet nine inches wide. Its top has been broken, whether by lightning, as the Indians say, or by its fall, or by the Spanish extirpators of idolatry, is not known. Thirty years ago it was lying prostrate. The front is covered with elaborate carvings in low relief, executed with admirable exactness and delicacy, and owing their almost perfect preservation to the extreme hardness of the stone. They represent what may be either a divine or a royal head, surrounded by many small kneeling figures with animal heads, some human, some of the puma, some of the condor, these being the largest quadruped and the largest bird of prey in the Andes. The treatment is conventional and the symbolism obscure, for we have no clue to the religion of the people who built these monuments. The association of animal forms with deities is a familiar thing in many ancient mythologies,—human figures had animal heads in Egypt, and bulls and lions had human heads in Assyria,—so one may guess at something of the kind in Peruvian mythology. But these sculptures are unlike anything else in South America, or in the Old World, and bear only a faint resemblance to some of the figures in Central American temples.[33] This sculptured portal, the unique record of a long-vanished art and worship, perhaps of a long-vanished race, makes an impression which remains fresh and clear in memory, because it appeals to one's imagination as the single and solitary voice from the darkness of a lost past.