File:The Andes and the Amazon -bor across the continent of South America (1876) (14784384602).jpg

Identifier: andesamazonborac76orto (find matches)
Title: The Andes and the Amazon :;bor across the continent of South America
Year: 1876 (1870s)
Authors: Orton, James
Subjects:
Publisher: New York: Harper
Contributing Library: Natural History Museum Library, London
Digitizing Sponsor: Natural History Museum Library, London

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bably, theconsolidation of closely allied people, having a commonorigin, but unequally developed. The solid history of Peru begins only about a hundredyears before the Spanish Conquest. Yet we are prettycertain that the imperial glories of the Ineas were but thelast gleams of a civilization that mounted up to perhapsthousands of years ; that, long before the advent of MancoCapac, the Andes had been the dwelling-place of raceswhose beginnings must have been coeval with the savagesof Western Europe. The earliest left no epitaph; butaround Lake Titicaca are massive monolithic monuments,which could not have been wrought by a childish nation,yet are prehistoric, pre-incarial. The latest of the fivestyles of architecture visible on the Andes (each represent-ing an age of human progress) is shown by the Temple ofthe Sun at Cuzco, built a century before Pizarro saw it. Pkehistokic Peru. 455 yet put together with the precision of mosaic* WhileEurope was getting up rollicking crusades, the Sun-
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kings had carved out of the rugged Andes an empireequal to that of Rome in the days of Hadrian, stretching * It is well to remember that many of the blocks were of Baalbec dimen-sions, of hard porphyry, and transported miles; and that the builders werebelow the medium stature, ignorant of the use of iron, and without a beast ofburden save the feeble llama. 456 The Ajstdes and the Amazons. over forty degrees of latitude. By the innumerable aban-doned towns and ruined public works, by the crowdedcemeteries and the terraced mountains, as though spacewere scarce, the traveler is forced to the conclusion that avast population once swarmed over the land. Alas, how fallen! A nation, once the France of theNew World, now peeled and enslaved, its manhood trod-den out. The buildings of Cnzco are of mud, raised onmassive foundations,^dobe on stone—the upper half, cath-olic and modern ; the lower, heathen and antique. Whata symbol! The foot-ball and servant of the Spaniard forthree centuries, th

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