They are deeply opposed to what we know as progress,[4] believing it conducive only to discontent and evils innumerable. They regard with sorrowful distrust our various mechanical contrivances. They are not surprised to learn that men are still condemned to death in our country, for the last man so condemned here was convicted of contriving a means to propel a craft without oars—in fact, a sail. It was a poor sail at that, and of little value save as an ornament. I said we might punish a man in our country, too, for inventing such a sail, though I thought we would hardly kill him. And then we learned that this man wasn’t killed either, for the Princess of that time, being still very young and unmarried, had, in accordance with divine precedent, looked upon the inventor and loved him, and granted him her hand in marriage—for this, it appears, was their one method of royal pardon, and certainly a pleasant one for the inventor. The sail, she told them, had been sent from the sun, so that the winds of the fields might aid them, which was all very beautiful, though it seems that the sun might have sent a better sail. Footnote 4: In comparing Mr. Chase’s record of the customs and characteristics of the Antarctic race with those of the ancient Peruvians, we find in Prescott (The Conquest) a paragraph which reveals still further the striking similarity between the two races. Prescott says: “Ambition, avarice, the love of change, the morbid spirit of discontent, those passions which most agitate the minds of men, found no place in the bosom of the Peruvian. The very condition of his being seemed to be at war with change. He moved on in the same unbroken circle in which his fathers had moved before him, and in which his children were to follow. It was the object of the Incas to infuse into their subjects a spirit of tranquillity, a perfect acquiescence in the established order of things.” It was the same Princess and her consort who began this great central temple in honor of their happiness, and who established as universal throughout the nation the “Pardon of Love”—that forever after no one who truly loved, and was so beloved in return, could perish by violence, and no one has so perished for more than five hundred of their long nights. The invention of the present Princess and her brother—the dark-dispeller—has been explained to them as also a gift of the sun, to aid it in vanquishing the long night, though, as it has thus far never been made to work and is regarded by Gale as hopeless, it would seem that in this case, as in the other, the sun might have sent a better one. This temple, however, is flawless. It stands on an island in the midst of a lake, or rather a widening of the river, and is, as before noted, located exactly at the point where the sun, during its daily circuit, appears always equidistant, above the horizon.[5] It is therefore on the earth’s southern axis, and represents, to us, the South Pole.