454: The Andes and the Amazons. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 



The Aborigines on the Andes and the Amazons. 



Two tribes of the red man dwell on the Andes of Ecua- 

 dor, Peru, and Bolivia, the Quichua and Aymara. They 

 are remnants of the great Inea nation, which attained 

 the highest, perhaps the only, native civilization in South 

 America. The Quichua Indians are scattered over the 

 mountains from New Granada to the latitude of Arequi- 

 pa; the Aymaras inhabit Bolivia and Southern Peru ; but 

 Lake Titicaca is still the home, as it was the cradle, of the 

 race. Doubtless these two include the fragments of other 

 tribes that paid tribute to Cuzco, but only these types can 

 be clearly distinguished. The empire was, probably, the 

 consolidation of closely allied people, having a common 

 origin, but unequally developed. 



The solid history of Peru begins only about a hundred 

 years before the Spanish Conquest. Yet we are pretty 

 certain that the imperial glories of the Ineas were but the 

 last gleams of a civilization that mounted up to perhaps 

 thousands of years ; that, long before the advent of Manco 

 Capac, the Andes had been the dwelling-place of races 

 whose beginnings must have been coeval with the savages 

 of "Western Europe. The earliest left no epitaph; but 

 around 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 five 

 styles of architecture visible on the Andes (each represent- 

 ing an age of human progress) is shown by the Temple of 

 the Sun at Cuzco, built a century before Pizarro saw it. 



