Upon this coast lived aborigines with flat noses, fishing from boats of inflated sealskins, and sleeping pell-mell in sealskin huts on heaps of seaweed, “tall, cannibalistic fishermen ... who used bone utensils, made primitive pottery, nets, and fabrics of osier.” Here lived the contemporaries of the Incas, Yuncas they were called, “dwellers in the hot lowlands,” distinct from those of the highlands, with their hideous thoughts painted on earthenware jars, and their hazy conception of a single god, their pragmatic worship of him by means of anything which he had made for their support and comfort, and their sacrifice to him of his greatest gift, human beings. Fancy is free to play along geologic or human history. Bones of mastodons as well as sea-bottom shells are found in the desert. Vanished races have embellished it in passing. Man has but added to the mystery of nature. Yet after such lapses of time the two are mingled indistinguishably. CHAPTER III DESERT PERSPECTIVE There was once a mine of gold in Peru. Later it became a copper mine, and now they sell the water that collects in the bottom. I The Incas found a rainless desert intersected by fruitful valleys as to-day, each independent, with its own gods, its own king, its own manners and customs, even its own diseases! Each valley chieftain lived upon a platform among the fields, but his villagers lived in the desert, not to encroach upon land capable of cultivation. These Yuncas excelled in the arts of weaving, fashioning metals, and in making pottery. In the name of the Sun the Incas descended from regions of snow to conquer the desert-dweller, with lofty disregard of the fact that the benign source of all blessings among the high table-lands was the scourge of the lowlands, where water-gods were worshipped. These religious wars changed the face of the country. Valleys were connected by a great highway. Sun temples and convents for the Virgins of the Sun supplanted the shrine of each valley’s chief god. Only one remained inviolate on the whole coast, that of the awful, intangible Pachacamac, who, being a fish-god in his great red temple by the sea, was not an idol, but the Invisible, Unknown, Omnipotent God, who had existed before either the sea or the sun; Pachacamac, he who formed the world out of nothing, the Creator whose image they dared not conceive. His name was mentioned with shrugging of shoulders and lifting up of hands, and he was served with fasting. Unlike Sun-ritual, his cult was a personal one, the inner worship of a people who paid tribute to golden fishes. The Maker of all Things had been conceived by those ancient peoples who, Balboa says, came from the north on a fleet of rafts, when the mountains had the climate of the valleys, and the whole actual coast was under the ocean.