[23] Some of the granite blocks in the fortress at Osaka in Japan are even larger, but these belong to the time of Hideoshi, early in the seventeenth century. There is some reason to think that the city or at least the neighbourhood of Cuzco may have been inhabited from very remote times.
[24] Such as that at Choqquequirau described by my friend Professor Bingham in his book entitled Across South America. He discovered, in 1911, an Inca building at a place on the river Pampaconas fifteen days' journey north of Cuzco and only two thousand feet above sea-level. It was not previously known that their power had extended so far in that direction.
[25] Dr. Sven Hedin gives the height of Tso Mavang as 15,098 feet above sea level.
[26] In some parts of Mexico the Indians use the seeds of a species of Chenopodium for food. Civilized man has not yet troubled himself to enquire what possibilities of development there may be in some of the plants which primitive or barbarous man turned to account.
[27] Dr. Uhle has suggested that the so-called seats may have been places on which to set images. Mr. Bingham thinks they were more probably spots on which priests stood to salute the rising sun by wafting kisses with their hands, a Peruvian practice described by Calancha, who compares the book of Job, chap. xxxi, v. 27.
[28] Lake Titicaca was originally, it would seem, called the lake of Chucuito, from an ancient town on its western shore.
[29] St. Thomas, according to an early legend, preached the Gospel on the coast of Malabar, so the Spanish ecclesiastics when they came to Mexico and Peru and heard tales of a wise deity or semi-divine teacher who had long ago appeared among the natives, concluded this must have been the Apostle, the idea of the connection of Eastern Asia with these new Western lands being still in their minds.
In the ancient city of Tlascala in Mexico I have seen a picture representing St. Thomas preaching to the natives in the guise of the Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Snake. St. Thomas is depicted as half serpent, half bird, but with a human head.
[30] Sir M. Conway gives the height of the higher peak Ancohuma (Hanko Uma) at 21,490. The loftiest summits in Peru seem to be Huascaran (some way N.N.E. of Lima), about 22,150 feet, and Coropuna (see p. [57]), 21,700 feet. Aconcagua in Chile is the culminating point of the Andes and the whole Western World (see p. [260]).
[31] Climbing and Exploration in the Bolivian Andes, 1901.