Mexican Maize Fields 33 



her fertility, and that her worshippers might expect plenteous 

 harvests. They praised and worshipped the fecundity of the 

 earth even while they recognized its terribleness, and repre- 

 sented it with symbols of horror. 



Mother Earth was given the form of a dragon, with claws 

 for hands and an animal mask. Her clothing was a skirt of 

 writhing serpents and a cloak of the skin of a sacrificed woman. 

 On her breast hung a necklace of human skulls. Well the 

 Aztecs knew that Nature is creator and destroyer; is beneficent 

 and cruel; and that her bounty is not without dangers for 

 man. Always they besought her for the gift of their daily 

 bread, but always, with strangely prophetic insight, they 

 shrank from what she had to give them with that bread. 



The twelfth and the thirteenth centuries saw the rise of 

 two great empires in the two Americas, that of the Aztecs in 

 Mexico and that of the Incas in Peru. Both derived from the 

 Maya, though the link between Cuzco and Yucatan is more 

 difficult to trace than that between the Maya and the Crane 

 People. 



Every historian commenting on Indian life has pointed out 

 that the cultural level of the natives of South, Central and 

 North America is marked by two signs, the use of adobe 

 blocks or stone in building, and the irrigation of the maize 

 fields. These two arts were the contribution of the Maya. 



Before the first Incas, who were llama-herders living in the 

 mountains southwest of Cuzco, came down and took pos- 

 session of the pleasanter valleys, the valley tribes had maize. 

 The earliest native food in Peru was the potato. The most 

 primitive pottery found in the ruins is shaped in imitation of 

 the brown tubers and dotted with "eyes/' But at some unre- 

 corded time in their history the Peruvians became corn- 

 planters. In the National Museum in Lima is an antique vase 

 of painted clay with a realistic decoration of a stalk of tasseled 

 corn. At the time of the Conquest, the Spaniards saw four 



