250 FIEEj COOEINGj AND VESSELS. 



omen if they let it out in any way. If, on tlie eve of tlie fes- 

 tivalj wtiicli was when the necessary preparations for the fol- 

 lowing day were made, there was no sun to light the new fire, 

 they made it with two thin smooth sticks as big as one's little 

 finger, and half a yard long, boring one against the other 

 {barrenando uno con otro) ; these little sticks are cinnamon co- 

 loured, and they call both the sticks themselves and the fire- 

 making V-yaca, one and the same term ser\dng for noun and 

 verb. The Indians use them instead of flint and steel, and 

 carry them on their journeys to get fire when they have to pass 

 the night in uninhabited places," etc. etc.^ 



If circumstantiality of detail were enough to make a story 

 credible, we might be obliged to receive this one, and even to 

 argue on the wonderful agreement of the manner of kindling 

 the sacred fire in Rome and in Peru. But the coincidences 

 between Garcilaso's Virgins of the Sun and Plutarch's Vestal 

 Virgins go farther than this. We are not only expected to 

 believe that there were Virgins of the Sun, that they kept up 

 a sacred fire whose extinction was an evil omen, and that this 

 fire was lighted by the sun's rays concentrated in a concave 

 mirror. We are also told that in Cuzco, as in Rome, the virgin 

 found unfaithful was to be punished by the special punishment 

 of being buried alive. ^ This is really too much. Whatever 

 may be the real basis of fact in the accounts of the Virgins of 

 the Sun and the feast of Raymi, the inference seems, to me at 

 least, most probable, that part or all of the accessory detail is 

 not history, but the realization of an idea of which Garcilaso 

 himself strikes the key-note when he says of this same feast 

 of Raymi, that it was celebrated by the Incas " in the city of 

 Cozco, ivhich was another Rome" {qiiefue otra Runia).^ Those 

 who happen to have experience of the old chroniclers of Spanish 

 America know how the whole race was possessed by a passion 

 for bringing out the Old World stories in a new guise, with a 

 local habitation and a name in America. Garcilaso's story of 



* Garcilaso do la Yega, p. 198. 



* Id., p. 109. Compare Diego Fernandez, Hist, del Peru, Seville, 1571, " y 

 nadie podia tratar, ni conversar con estas Mamaconas. T si alguno lo intentaua, 

 luego le interrauan biuo." ^ Id., p. 195. 



