Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 228, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 September 1915 — HEART OF ANCIENT EMPIRE [ARTICLE]

HEART OF ANCIENT EMPIRE

Fertile Highland Valleys That Lie Between Two Towering Mountain , Jr Ranges.

To the east tower the White Cordillera, beyond which molder the miasmatic jungles of the Montana; to the west rise the snowy altitudes we have just traversed, writes Ernest Peixotto, in describing “The Land of the Incas,” in Scribner’s. Between these two ranges lie a succession of highland valleys some 10,000 to 13,000 feet above the sea, each separated from the other by nudos, or knots, of lesser traverse chains of mountains. These valleys in our latitudes would be covered with eternal snow. Here under the tropics they blossom with all the products of the temperate zone, enjoying a cool, invigorating climate and supporting a large population of Indians.

They constituted the heart of the ancient empire of the Incas, that amazing despotism that stunned 1 the Spanish conquerors with the wisdom of its institutions, the splendor and the size of its buildings, the rich produce of its fields, and, above all, with the wealth of its mines of gold and silver and its amassed riches of centuries. When the Spaniard came, Huayna Capac had already extended his dominions as, far north as Quito and as far south as the land of the Araucanian Indians of Chile. Even most of the savage tribes of the Montana owed him allegiance, and only the Pacific bounded his territories to the westward. The center of his empire lay in these high plateaus of the Andes —the fair and fertile valleys of Huaylas and Vilcanota, the bare and bleak plains of Cerro do Pasco and Titicaca’s basin. We were now entering the last named, the most southern of the four, and were then to turn northward to visit the Inca capital, Cusco, the navel of the kingdom, as its name signifies.