Just how much plunder Pizarro got in his raids upon the Incas is not known, and cannot be estimated, but millions went to the King of Spain as his twenty per cent.; the Catholic Church got millions more as her share; Sir Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and other pirates got away with an immense amount of gold and silver; and the quantity expended in the erection of churches, convents, monasteries, and palaces by the viceroys is incalculable. History asserts that ninety millions of dollars’ worth of precious metals was torn from the Inca temples, and the faithful subjects of Atahualpa filled the room in which he was imprisoned with gold, in their endeavor to satisfy the avarice of the invaders. Prescott and Robertson and other historians tell fabulous stories of the wealth of the Incas, and we know it was enough to restore financial prosperity to Spain, and to give every cutthroat who came to the coast a fortune. [Illustration: WHAT THE SPANIARDS LEFT.] The amount of money made by Peru from her guano deposits cannot be estimated any more accurately than by the plunder stolen from the Incas. The exports have continued from 1846 to the present day, and the annual shipments have amounted to millions of tons, valued between twenty and thirty million dollars, and this to the benefit of a State whose population has never reached two millions, and three-fourths of which were Indians who had no share in its profits. The exhausted lands of the Old World required this manure to revive them, and their owners paid high prices for what cost Peru nothing. The result of this revenue was the continuation of the extravagance among the people which was practised by their forefathers when the mountains poured out streams of silver. It was an epidemic of riches, and the Government of Peru, instead of wisely hoarding its source of wealth and protecting it, plunged into a system of reckless expenditure, until the end of the war found its revenues cut off and the country burdened with a debt of two hundred and fifty million dollars which it never can pay. [Illustration: WHERE THE GUANO LIES.] But even if Peru and Bolivia have been robbed of all their guano, the deposits of nitrate of soda in the deserts along their coasts would have made them rich again; but Chili has stolen these also. The whole coast, from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth parallel of latitude, appears to be one solid mass of this valuable mineral, fit for a hundred different uses, and worth in the market from forty to sixty dollars a ton. It was discovered in 1833 by an accident, the hero of the discovery being a forlorn old Englishman by the name of George Smith. There is no telling how much lies in the mines, but it is the opinion of those who have explored the country that at the present rate of excavation it will take eight or ten centuries to dig it away. [Illustration: A NITRATE MINING TOWN.]