These jars were the ephemeral tablets on which a whole people chose to leave records of itself. The work of their hands can be held in ours. We can look into the staring Indian faces or upon the weird animals which pleased them, shining under a glaze which is the forgotten accomplishment of those remote tribes. There are finely drawn portraits of the dead man’s friends, whom he may have wished as fellow pilgrims, heads of men and women singing or smiling, some distorted with pain. The human face twisted to the same lines then as now. Wonderful fish glide among aquatic plants, the fox enamored of the moon languishes along her thin crescent. “The sneaking cat, the sleepy pelican, the supercilious, impudent parrot,” in softest yellow, white, red-brown, or black, glance all the iris shades under a purple glaze. It was not enough to paint the manners and customs of the people, the fauna and flora of their country; they chose also to represent what they thought and believed as well as the adjustment of their sandals. We can peer into their monstrous, often loathsome, mythology and into their intangible land of fancy. Cats fight with griffins. A lizard with the face of an owl wears a jacket and bracelets. A chieftain in full regalia has a girdle ending in a fringe of almond-eyed, many-footed scorpions, each with a different number of feet. With snakes’ heads as earrings, a warrior with canine teeth smaller than the snail with forked tongue beside him is fishing for an octopus with a snake-line, whose head, as bait, has caught a man. Crab-hands grasp from ears at a fleeing figure with a snake-like body, numerous feet intermingle with a human leg, two arms with nippers, and a fantastic head with waving antennae. A cactus forms the background. The sun looks forth from the heart of a starfish. A fanciful eye, all alone, with unknown appendages and impossible proboscis, glitters under its dark, lustrous sheen. A ghastly face with wings presides at a dance of stags. And here is a vessel completely covered by a pair of elaborated nippers! In it are placed some passion-flowers, a whirl of purple and black. Every uncanny suggestion in an animal is worked out to complete development. We may do the Yuncas the honor to call it allegorical. It recalls the Mexican legend that “the present order of things will be swept away, perhaps by hideous beings with the faces of serpents, who walk with one foot, whose heads are in their breasts, whose huge hands serve as sunshades, and who can fold themselves in their immense ears.” It is primarily this portrait pottery which proves the great antiquity of races in Peru. And the deeper one digs, the finer the designs. Sitting on the ebony bench with the skin of a jaguar across its back, we ate _dulces_ (sweets) made of eggs, and drank tea out of ancient porcelain against a background of embroidered Spanish shawls. A yellow bird, a _cheireoque_, who knows everything, sat upon a perch but did not sing. III