James Bryce Bryce - South America Observations and Impressions

The last estimate presented puts the amount at $375,000,000. The fortifications are expected to cost about $12,000,000 more.

London to Sydney via Suez 11,531 miles, via Panama 12,525; London to Auckland via Suez 12,638 miles, via Panama, 11,404.

Since our visit Coropuna has been ascended by my friend Professor Hiram Bingham of Yale University (U.S.A.). The average of his observations gives it a height of 21,700 feet. A very interesting account of his long and difficult snow climb may be found in Harper's Magazine for March, 1912.

The Harvard Observatory Report gives it as 7550.

Quoted in the learned notes to Mr. Bandelier's valuable book, Islands of Titicaca and Koati , p. 161, from a MS. in the National Archives at Lima. Omate is probably the volcano now usually known as Ubinas.

Chapter XVI.

Paramo is the name applied to these bleak regions between the valleys.

This is the term of respect by which an Indian usually addresses a white man of superior station. The word was in Inca mythology the name of a divine or half-divine hero – it was also the name of one of the Inca sovereigns.

Above this valley, nearly a hundred miles away to the northeast, rises the splendid peak of Salcantay, whose height, said to approach 22,000 feet, will some day attract an aspiring mountain climber.

It is fair to say that when the conquest was once accomplished, Valverde seems to have protested against the reduction of the Indians to slavery.

While these pages are passing through the press (April, 1912), I am informed that a serious effort is about to be made to lay drains in and generally to clean up Cuzco.

The name "Inca" properly belongs to the ruling family or clan in the Peruvian monarchy, of whose ethnic relations to its subjects we know very little, but I use it here to denote not only the dynasty, but the epoch of their rule, which apparently covered two centuries (possibly more) before the arrival of Pizarro. The expression "The Inca" means the reigning monarch.

A patient archæologist might be able by examining and photographing specimens of each style to determine their chronological succession and thus throw some light on the history of the city. The oldest type appeared to be that of the Inca Roca wall, very similar to that of the Sacsahuaman walls to be presently described.

Good specimens of all these things may be seen in the American Museum of Natural History of New York.

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.

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.

Dr. Sven Hedin gives the height of Tso Mavang as 15,098 feet above sea level.

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.

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.

Lake Titicaca was originally, it would seem, called the lake of Chucuito, from an ancient town on its western shore.

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.