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ion had been restored, and he was able to undertake the exploration of the ancient monuments of Peru under conditions far more favorable than he could have dared to hope.

His explorations occupied about eighteen months, during which he traveled some five thousand miles, visiting all the great centres of the ancient Peruvian civilization. Himself an accomplished surveyor, he carried compass and measuring line. He was accompanied by an artist and a photographer. The photographer died in the bleak puna of the Cordilleras; but he himself had mastered the art, and was able to supply his place. When at length he returned to New

I could." He has performed it so well as
to warrant his confidence that, "so far as
illustrating Inca civilization from existing
monuments is concerned, the results of fur-
ther exploration would have been merely
cumulative;" and that the selections from
his materials "embodied in this volume
leave little to be desired by the student of
Peruvian archæology, so far as its elucida-
tion depends on the monuments of the coun-
try." In this paper we shall touch upon a
few of the leading points of the book, pass-
ing with brief allusion those which the au-
thor himself has presented in this Magazine
eight years ago.
That territory which the Spaniards found

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called Peru, comprised, in a general way, all those portions of the present states of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and a part of Chili lying between the Pacific and the eastern range of the Cordilleras. It extended from about latitude 4° north to 34° south, some 2500 miles. The average breadth from west to east was not far from 400 miles. The entire area was thus about one million square miles, about

York, he brought with him hundreds, per- | under the sway of the Incas, and which they haps thousands, of sketches, drawings, photographs, and works of ancient art and industry. The work of arranging his mass of material grew upon him as he went on, and he resolved to present portions of it in this Magazine. These will be found in the five successive numbers from April to August, 1868. In the midst of his labors sore and long-continued illness fell upon him, delaying the continuance of the work, and doubt-equal to that of Great Britain, France, Gerless to some extent impairing its complete

ness.

"To select from the vast mass of materials gathered by me," he writes, "has been no easy task. I have performed it as best

many, Austria, and Spain, or to that portion of the United States lying east of the Mississippi. A very large proportion of this territory is utterly unfit for human habitation. The present population is about 5,000,000.

What it was in the times of the Incas is purely a matter for conjecture, for no reliance is to be placed on the statements of the Spanish chroniclers, as that of Las Casas,

ROCK TOMBS, PISAO, PERU.

who asserts that the Spaniards in a few years 'slaughtered 40,000,000 in Peru alone. Mr. Squier supposes that the population was somewhat more than 10,000,000. From the indications of a dense population in considerable districts now almost uninhabited, we should estimate it much higher; perhaps not less than twice as great. Geographic

tion is sub-polar, or even polar, in climate.

Seven-eighths of the entire surface is occupied by the two great ranges of the Cordilleras. The western range runs parallel with the coast, at an average distance of about forty miles, but sometimes receding much farther, and sometimes coming down so close that the long waves of the Pacific seem to break against its rocky feet. This range forms the true watershed of the continent, and is nowhere broken through to give passage to rivers. The eastern Cordillera, or Andes proper, runs nearly parallel to the other, sometimes at a distance of 200 miles, sometimes so close that there is only a narrow valley between, and at some points the two ranges come together, forming a single knob. This range is broken through in various places to afford a passage to the rivers which rise on the eastern slope of the western range and on the western slope of the eastern. Some of these run nearly a thousand miles due northward, parallel with the western range and the Pacific, before they can find a passage through the eastern range, and unite to form the mighty Amazon, whose mouth is in the Atlantic, 4000 miles from its source, which is scarcely 300 miles from the Pacific.

The summit of the western Cordillera

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ally, the Inca empire lay almost wholly with- | spreads out into a broad undulating plain the tropics; but climatically, owing to teau from 14,000 to 18,000 feet above the elevation, a large part belongs to the tem- sea, with numerous peaks some thousands perate zones, while no inconsiderable por- of feet higher. This platean, from fifty to

one hundred miles broad, is the Despoblado,
or unpeopled region, where animal life is
confined to the hardy vicuña and the con-
dor soaring high in the blue heavens, and
where there is no trace of human habita-
tion, except the huts of refuge built by the
Incas along the road which led from the
northern to the southern parts of
their empire.

From the Despoblado the land sinks to a lower but still elevated plateau, upon an average 11,000 feet above the sea, lying between the two ranges of the Cordilleras. We call it a plateau for want of a better term, but the surface is very diversified. There are peaks and long ranges which rise far above the limits of perpetual snow even under the equator.

There are broad tracts al

gion, although at intervals of many years heavy showers occur. The few rivers which are fed by the melting snows are mostly swallowed up by the thirsty sand before they reach the ocean. But wherever water is found, the fertility is exuberant. The ancient inhabitants made the most of these

N.J

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says:

TERRACE WALL AND AZEQUIA.

most as bare and desolate as the Despo- | rivers. Their system of irrigation has few blado, in which are deep-sunken semi-trop- equals in any part of the globe. Mr. Squier ical valleys. These valleys are aptly designated by the Spanish word bolson," pocket." Legend says, with how much truth no man can now tell, that the original seat of Inca civilization was on the shores and islands

"The system of irrigation of the ancient Peruvians is well worthy of attention. Even in those parts where rain falls during six months of the year, they constructed immense irrigating canals. They not only economized every rood of ground by building their towns and habitations in places unfit for cultivation, and buried their dead where they would not encumber the arable soil, but they terraced the hill-sides and mountains to heights of hundreds and thousands of feet, and led the waters of mountain springs and torrents downward until they were lost in the valleys below. These azequias, as they are now called, were often of considtheerable size and great length, extending in some in

of the sacred lake Titicaca. Historically, the centre and seat of the Inca power was the lofty bolson of Cuzco, lying between the valleys of the Vilcomaya and the Apurimac, affluents of the Amazon.

The long narrow plain between the Cordillera and the Pacific is, as a whole,

FORTIFIED PASS, PISAO.

most desert tract on the globe, unless the interior of Australia may dispute the preeminence. For the most part, it is a waste of dry sand. Practically, it is a rainless re

stances for hundreds of miles. I have followed them for days together, and have seen them winding amidst the projections of the hills, curving in and out as topography required-here sustained by high wall of masonry, there cut into the living rock, and in some cases conducted in tunnels through sharp spurs of the obstructing mountain. Occasionally they were carried over narrow valleys or depressions in the ground on embankments fifty or sixty feet high. It is on the desert Pacific slope, however, where no vegetation could otherwise exist, except on the immediate banks of streams descending from the Cordilleras, that we find the most extensive irrigating works of the ancient inhabitants. They not only constructed dams at different elevations in the stream, with side weirs to deflect the water over the higher slope of the valleys, but built enormous reservoirs high up among the mountains, as well as down nearer the sea, to receive the surplus water of the season when the snows melted. One of these reservoirs, in the valley of the Nepeña, is three-fourths of a mile long by more than half a mile broad, and consists of a massy wall of stone, eighty feet thick at the base, carried across a gorge between two lofty, rocky hills. It was supplied by two canals, at different elevations, one starting fourteen miles up the river, and the other from living springs five miles distant."

All this, as well as the immense ruins scattered at intervals, indicates a dense population in certain circumscribed localities, while their absence elsewhere shows equally conclusively that then, as now, a very large proportion of the empire was uninhabited and practically uninhabitable. Great cities, in our sense of the word, were impossible; for, as there were no beasts

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of burden except the feeble llama, and | On the coast the climate was warm, but these only in the mountains, food must be greatly tempered by the near snowy mountconsumed hard by where it was raised, and ains. Storms were unfrequent, and the inthe largest arable areas were only a few habitants had little need to protect themsquare miles in extent. Cuzco was beyond selves against the weather, so that their doubt the largest city, but Mr. Squier is dwellings were so frailly constructed as to confident that its population could never have long since perished, except in the towns, have been more than 50,000, although the which took the character of fortresses. The Spanish chroniclers, with much less than most striking object in nature was the great their usual exaggeration, put it at 200,000. ocean dashing upon the rocky shores. In it they saw the representation of the Supreme Power, and Viracocha, the god of the sea, became their chief divinity, presiding over a pantheon represented by sea-monsters and birds of prey.

When and whence Peru was peopled it seems idle even to conjecture. For all historical purposes, the various peoples were, as far as we know, true autochthones, "sprung from the soil." If it be assumed that they had a common origin with the rest of the human family, the separation took place at a period far anterior to their earliest legends; and there is no evidence that they

In the mountains the climate was cold, with heavy rains in the winter. The dwellings even of the common people were massively built, with thick walls of solid stone

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ever had any knowledge of other peoples beyond the ocean which shut them in on one side, and the impassable mountains which hemmed them in on the other. It is clear that within semi-historic times they were divided into different tribes or races, differing from each other somewhat as the Latians differed from the Gauls or the Normans from the Saxons, and that there were long wars and feuds between these tribes, especially those on the coast, which were terminated by the gradual Inca conquest, beginning approximately in the fourteenth century, and concluding with the subjugation of Quito in almost the year when Columbus first sighted the shores of the New World.

We may, in a general way, divide these tribes into two classes, the dwellers on the coast and the dwellers in the mountains.

or rubble-work, and steep thatched roofs to shed off the rain. The sun was the beneficial being who alone made life endurable on the lofty plains, and rendered it delightful in the low-lying valleys. He was their chief, perhaps we may say their sole, deity. He was the sole owner of the soil, which he alone rendered useful; and his children, the Incas, were his landlords, reserving a third for his worship, a third for the maintenance of their own imperial state, and granting a third to the people by life tenure. No one could be absolutely poor, for every son of the soil had an indefeasible right to a portion sufficient for his frugal maintenance. None save the Inca and those of his blood could be rich, for there was nothing to represent accumulated wealth. The flocks of llamas were the property of the Inca; his was the gold and silver slowly gathered

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