The vicuña defies pursuit or capture and disappears at the first glimpse of intruders, driving the young before him. He is no less wild than in the days when he was royal purveyor of softest fabric to the Incas’ wardrobes. His habits are as elusive now as then, when Indians thirty thousand strong entrapped the wild animals among the mountain-tops. These solemn huntings took place every fourth year. Meanwhile the wise men kept account of the flocks with colored threads, so-called _quipus_, their method of enumeration. [Illustration: ALPACAS ON THE ANDEAN PUNA.] Cousins of the vicuña are the awkward _huanacus_, which drink brackish water as gladly as fresh and seek a favorite valley where they may breathe their last and pile up their accumulated bones--as sea-lions go to particular islands to die, the wounded being helped thither by companions. The Incas worshipped the llama, alpaca, and these wild relatives of theirs; they carved their grotesque forms in stone and fashioned their likeness in gold and silver for household gods. Far above the limit of human life, even beyond the haunts of vicuñas, there is still one living creature. His shadow sweeps over the wilderness as he passes between it and the sun--a shadow the only appearance of life. It is the condor, who lays her white eggs on the bare rock of the loftiest mountain peaks and knows where the heart of each animal lies. The mighty condor, who can kill an ox with his beak of steel, who can swallow a sheep or exist a month without food. The majestic condor, who swims in the highest air or sweeps down upon his prey with a deafening whir of wings. The condor, a symbol of light, who circles up to the ether of outer space on an almost imperceptible, tremulous motion, or proceeds undisturbed, without effort or flutter of wings, in the icy teeth of a tempest, a symbol of storm. He watches the sun rise over a continent-jungle, glimmering with heat and dampness, and long after the sunset glow has faded from the highest snowy peak, he sees its fiery ball drop beyond the farthest edge of the Pacific. The fabulous condor, known in Europe when Peru was a myth, a hostage from a fairyland of gold and silver; a griffin which revels in solitude and in evidences of things gone by. Loneliness is the condor’s only friend. The wind howls through his broadened wings. CHAPTER II A MEGALITHIC CITY AND A SACRED LAKE I There is something more mysterious than the sea, and that is the desert; something more mysterious than the desert, and that is the mountains; something more mysterious than the mountains, and that is the jungle. Yet there is something with a deeper mystery than all--the tradition of a great race that has struggled to a climax and subsided.