The Inca was the head of a colossal bureaucracy which had ramifications into the very homes of the people themselves. Thus after the Inca came the governors of provinces, who were of the blood-royal; then officials were placed above ten thousand families, a thousand families, a hundred, and even ten families, upon the principle that the rays of the sun enter everywhere. Personal freedom was a thing unknown. Each individual was under direct surveillance, as it were, branded and numbered like the herds of llamas which were the special property of the sun incarnate, the Inca. Rules and regulations abounded in a manner unheard of even in police-ridden Prussia, and no one had the opportunity in this vast social machine of thinking or acting for himself. His walk in life was marked out for him from the time he was five years of age, and even the woman he was to marry was selected for him by the responsible officials; the age at which he should enter the matrimonial state being fixed at not earlier than twenty-four years in the case of a man and eighteen in that of a woman. Even the place of his birth was indicated by a coloured ribbon (which he dared not remove) tied round his head. The Peruvian legend of the coming to earth of the sun-race, of whom the Inca was held to be the direct descendant, told how two beings, Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo or Oullo, the offspring of the Sun and Moon, descended from heaven in the region of Lake Titicaca. They had received commands from their parent, the sun-god, to traverse the country until they came to a spot where a golden wedge they possessed should sink into the ground, and at this place to found a culture-centre. The wedge disappeared at Cuzco, which Garcilasso el Inca de la Vega (the most important of the ancient chroniclers of Peru) interprets as meaning 'navel,' or, in twentieth-century idiom, 'Hub of the Universe,' but which possibly possesses a more exact rendering in the words 'cleared space.' The city founded, Manco Capac instructed the men in the arts of civilisation, and his consort busied herself in teaching the women the domestic virtues, as weaving and spinning. Leaving behind them as earthly representatives their son and daughter, they reascended to heaven, and from the children they left upon earth the race of Incas was said to have sprung. Thus it was that all Peruvian monarchs must marry their sisters, as it was not permissible to defile the offspring of the blood of the Son by mortal union--the breaking of which law assisted in the ruin of the Peruvian empire. Like the Mexicans, the Peruvians appear to have acknowledged the existence of a Supreme Being. The attributes of this Supreme Being, through the fostering care of a special cultus, soon developed the rank of deities, each having a strongly marked identity.