But the Southern Continent had also its seat of a remarkable native civilisation; which, like that of Mexico, derived some of its most striking characteristics from the physical aspects of the country in which it originated. The peculiar natural advantages of Peru resulted from the settlement of a people on the lofty plateaus of the Andes, but within the tropics, where at each successive elevation a different climate was secured. Such products as the mercantile navies of Northern Europe gather from many distant shores, were there brought within the compass of an industrious population: who fed their flocks on the cold crests of the sierra; cultivated their gardens and orchards on its higher plateaus; and gathered the luxuriant products of the tropics from the country that for them lay, for the most part, beneath the clouds, and spread away from the lowest slopes of the Andes to the neighbouring shores of the Pacific. The character of the people, and the nature of the civilisation of this remarkable country, presented many striking contrasts to the customs and institutions of the Mexicans, and they have generally been assumed as of totally independent origin. Peru has her historic traditions, no less than Mexico; and her native historian, Garcilasso de la Vega, a descendant, through his mother, from the royal line of the Incas: who plays for them the part which Fernando de Alva did for his Tezcucan ancestry. Seen through such a medium, the traditions of the Inca race expand into gorgeous pages of romance; and the institutions of European chivalry and medieval polity are grafted on the strange usages of an Indian nation, remarkable for its own well-matured commonwealth, and unique phases of native-born civilisation. Sabaism constituted the essential element of Peruvian religious faith, and gave form and colour to the national rites and traditions. Manco Capac and Mama Oello Huaco, their mythic instructors in the arts of agriculture, weaving, and spinning, were the Children of the Sun; their high religious festivals were determined by the solstices and equinoxes; and Quito, the holy city, which lay immediately under the Equator, had within it the pillar of the sun, where its vertical rays threw no shadow at noon, and they believed the god of light to seat himself in full effulgence in his temple. The sacred pillar stood in the centre of a circle described within the court of the great temple, traversed by a diameter drawn from east to west, by means of which the period of the equinoxes was determined; and both then, and at the solstices, the pillar was hung with garlands, and offerings of fruit and flowers were made to the divine luminary and parent of mankind. The title of the sovereign Inca was the Child of the Sun; and the territory of the empire was divided into three portions, of which one, constituting the lands of the Sun, maintained the costly ceremonial of public worship, with the temples and their numerous priests and vestal virgins.