CHAPTER XII

TWO ATLANTEAN CIVILISATIONS
Toltec. in Ancient Peru , B. C. 12,000
( Continued)
The architecture of this ancient race differed in many ways from any other with which we are acquainted, and its study would be of extreme interest to any clairvoyant who was possessed of technical knowledge of the subject. Our own lack of such knowledge makes it difficult for us to describe its de¬ tails accurately, though we may, perhaps, hope to convey something of the general impression which it gives at the first glance to observers of the present century.
It was colossal, yet unpretentious; bearing evi¬ dence in many cases of years of patient labour, but distinctly designed for use rather than for show. Many of the buildings were of vast ex¬ tent, but most of them would seem to a modern eye somewhat out of proportion, the ceilings being nearly always much too low for the size of the rooms. For example, it was no unusual thing to find in the house of a Governor several apartments about the size of Westminster Hall, and yet none
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of them would measure more than twelve feet or so from floor to ceiling. Pillars were not unknown, but were sparingly used, and what with us would be a graceful colonnade was in old Peru more usually a wall with frequent apertures in it. Such pillars as there were were massive, and often monolithic.
The true arch with the keystone was ap¬ parently unknown to them, though windows or doors with a semi-circular top were by no means uncommon. In the larger examples of these a heavy metal semi-circle was sometimes made and fixed upon the side-posts of the aperture; but they generally trusted entirely to the powerful adhesive which they used in the place of mortar. The exact nature of this material we do not know, but it was certainly effective. They cut and fitted their enormous blocks of stone with the greatest accuracy, so that the joint was barely perceptible ; then they plastered the outside of each junction with clay, and poured in their 4 mortar5 in a hot and fluid condition. Minute as were the crevices between the stones, this fluid found and filled them, and when it cooled it set like flint, which, indeed, it closely resembled in appearance. The clay was then scraped off the outside, and the wall was complete ; and if after the lapse of centuries a crack in the masonry ever made its appearance it was certainly not at any of the joints, for they were stronger than even the stone itself.
The majority of the houses of the peasantry were built of what we must call brick, since it was manufactured from clay; but the c bricks 5 were
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large cubes, measuring perhaps a yard each way; and the clay was not baked, but mixed with some chemical preparation and left in the open air for some months to harden ; so that in consistency and appearance they resembled blocks of cement rather than bricks, and a house built of them was scarcely inferior in any way to one of stone.
All houses, even the smallest, were built on the classical and oriental plan of the central court¬ yard, and all alike had walls of what would now be considered enormous thickness. The simplest and poorest cottage had only four rooms, one on each of the sides of the tiny courtyard into which they all faced, and as these rooms had usually no ex¬ ternal windows the appearance of such houses from outside was dull and bare. Very little attempt at exterior ornament was made in the poorer parts of the city or village ; a kind of frieze of a very simple pattern was usually all that broke the monotony of the dead walls of the cottages.
The entrance was always at one corner of the square, and in earlier days the door was simply a huge slab of stone, which ran up, like a portcullis or a modern sash-window, in grooves and by means of counterweights. When the door was shut the counterweights could be rested on shelves and detached, so that the door remained a practically immovable mass, which would have been distinctly discouraging to a burglar, had any such person existed in so well-ordered a State. In better- class houses this door-slab was elaborately carved, and at a later period it was often replaced by a thick plate of metal. The method of working it, however,
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was but little varied, though a few instances were observed of heavy metal doors which turned on pivots.
The larger houses were originally built on exactly the same plan, though with a good deal more ornamentation, not only in the way of carving the stone into patterns, but also in diversifying its surface with broad bands of metal. In such a climate, dwellings so massively built were almost everlasting, and the majority of the houses in existence and occupation at the time of which we write were of this type. Some later ones, how¬ ever — evidently built in the centuries when the population had become convinced of the stability of the Government system, and of its power to make the laws respected — had a double set of rooms round their courtyards, as any modern house might have, one set facing into the yard (which in their case was a beautifully-laid-out garden) and the other facing outwards towards the surrounding scenery. This latter set had large windows — or rather open¬ ings, for, though several kinds of glass were made, it was not used in windows — which could be closed on the same principle as that of the doors.
Still it will be seen that the general style of the domestic architecture, in large and small houses alike, was somewhat severe and monotonous, though admirably adapted to the climate. The roofs were mostly heavy and nearly flat, and were almost invariably made either of stone, or of sheets of metal. One of the most remarkable features of their house¬ building was the almost entire absence of wood, which they avoided because of its combustibility ;
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178 MAN: WHENCE, HOW AND WHITHER
and in consequence of this precaution conflagrations were unknown in ancient Peru.
The way in which houses were built was peculiar. No scaffolding was employed, but as the house was erected it was filled with earth, so that when the walls had risen to their full height there was a level surface of earth within them. Upon this the stones of the roof were laid, and then the hot cement was poured between them as usual. As soon as that had set, the earth was dug out and the roof left to support its own pro¬ digious weight, which, thanks to the power of that wonderful cement, it seems always to have done with perfect safety. Indeed, the whole structure, roof and walls alike, became, when finished, to all intents and purposes one solid block, as though it had been hollowed out of the living rock — a method, by the way, which was actually adopted in some places upon the mountain-side.
A first-floor had been added to a few of the houses in the capital city, but the idea had not achieved popular favour, and such daring innova¬ tions were extremely rare. Something resembling the effect of a series of stories one above the other was indeed obtained in a curious way in some of the erections in which the priests or monks of the Sun were housed, but the arrange¬ ment was not one which could ever have been extensively adopted in a crowded city. An immense platform of earth, say a thousand feet square and about fifteen or eighteen feet in height, was first made, and then upon that, but fifty feet in from the edge on each side, another huge platform nine
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hundred feet square was constructed ; upon that there was another having sides measuring eight hundred feet, and above that a fourth measuring seven hundred feet, and so they rose, steadily de¬ creasing in size, until they reached a tenth stage only a hundred feet square, and then in the centre of that final platform they built a small shrine to the Sun.
The effect of the whole was something like a great, flat pyramid rising by broad shallow steps — a sort of Primrose Hill cut into terraces. And out of the upright front of each of these great platforms they hollowed out rooms — cells, as it were, in which the monks and their guests lived. Each cell had an outer and an inner room, the latter being lighted only from the former, which was quite open to the air on the side which faced outwards ; indeed it consisted only of three sides and a roof. Both rooms were lined and
floored with slabs of stone, cemented into solid¬ ity in the usual manner. The terraces in front
were laid out in gardens and walks, and alto¬
gether the cells were pleasant residences. In several cases a natural elevation was cut into terraces in this manner, but most of these pyramids were artificially erected. Frequently they ran tunnels into the heart of the lowest tier of such a pyramid, and constructed subterranean chambers there, which were used as storehouses for grain and other
necessaries.
In addition to these remarkable flattened pyra¬ mids there were the ordinary temples of the Sun, some of them of great size and covering a large
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amount of ground, though all of them had, to European eyes, the universal defect of being too low for their length. They were always surround¬ ed by pleasant gardens, under the trees of which was done most of the teaching for which these temples were so justly famed.
If the exterior of these temples was sometimes less imposing than might have been desired, at any rate the interior more than atoned for any possible defects. The large extent to which the precious metals were used in decoration was a feature of Peruvian life even thousands of years later, when a handful of Spaniards succeeded in dominating the comparatively degenerate race which had taken the place of that whose customs we are trying to describe. At the time of which we write the inhabitants were not acquainted with our art of gilding, but they were exceedingly clever in hammering out metal into large thin plates, and it was no uncommon thing for the greater temples to be literally lined with gold and silver. The plates covering the walls were often as much as a quarter of an inch in thickness, and yet were moulded over delicate reliefs in the stone as though they had been so much paper, so that from our modern point of view a temple was frequently the depository of untold wealth.
The race which built the temples regarded all this not as wealth in our sense at all, but merely as fit and proper decoration. It must be remembered that ornament of this nature was by no means confined to the temples; all houses of any con¬ sideration had their walls lined with some kind
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of metal, just as ours now are papered, and to have the bare stone showing in the interior was with them equivalent to a white-washed wall with us — practically confined to outhouses or the dwell¬ ings of the peasantry. But only the palaces of the King and the chief Governors were lined with pure gold like the temples ; for ordinary folk, all kinds of beautiful and serviceable alloys were made, and rich effects were produced at comparatively little cost.
In thinking of their architecture we must not forget the chain of fortresses which the King erected round the boundaries of his Empire, in order that the barbarous tribes beyond the frontier might be kept in check. Here again for accurate description and for criticism that shall be worth anything we need the services of an expert ; but even the veriest civilian can see that in many cases the situation of these forts was admirably chosen, and that, short of artillery, they must have been practically impregnable. The height and thickness of their walls was in some cases enor¬ mous, and they had the peculiarity (as indeed had all high walls in the country) that they gradually tapered from a thickness of many feet at the base to a much more ordinary size at a height of twenty or thirty yards. Look-out chambers and secret passages were hollowed out in the heart of these wonderful walls, and the interior of the fort was so arranged and so fully provisioned that the garrison must have been able to stand a prolonged siege without discomfort. The observers were partic¬ ularly struck by the ingenious arrangement of a
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series of gates one within the other, connected by narrow and tortuous passages, which would have placed any force attempting to storm the fortress completely at the mercy of the defenders.
But the most wonderful works of this strange people were without doubt their roads, bridges and aqueducts. The roads were carried for hundreds of miles across the country (some of them for more than a thousand miles), with a splendid dis¬ regard of natural difficulties that would extort ad¬ miration from the boldest modern engineers. Every¬ thing was done on a colossal scale, and though the amount of labour involved must in some cases have been almost incalculable, the results achieved were magnificent and permanent. The whole road was paved with flat slabs, much as are the side¬ walks of our London streets ; but at each side of it all the way along were planted trees for shade, and odoriferous shrubs which filled the air with their fragrance ; so that the country was intersected with a network of splendid paved avenues, up and down which were daily passing the messengers of the King. These men were in effect postmen also, since it was part of their duty to carry letters free of charge for any who wished to send them.
It was when the road-constructors came to a ravine or a river that the patient genius and indomitable perseverance of the race were seen at their highest level. As we have said, they were ignorant of the principle of the true arch, and the nearest that they could approach to it in bridge¬ building was to cause each layer of stones to project slightly beyond that below it, until in this
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way two piers eventually met, and their wonderful cement hardened the whole fabric into the likeness of solid rock. They knew nothing of coffer-dams and caissons, so they often spent incredible labour in temporarily diverting the course of a river in order that they might bridge it ; or, in other cases, they built out a breakwater into the stream until they reached the spot where the pier was to stand, and then, when it was thus completed, knocked away their breakwater. Because of these difficulties they preferred embankment work to bridging, where- ever it was possible ; and they would often carry a road or an aqueduct across even a deep ravine
with a considerable river in it, by means of a
huge embankment with many culverts in it, rather than by an ordinary bridge.
Their system of irrigation was wonderfully perfect, and it was to a great extent carried on even by the later race, so that much of the country which has now relapsed into desert was green and fertile, until the water-supply fell into the still more incompetent hands of the Spanish conquerors. It is probable that no engineering feats in the world have been greater than the making of the roads and aqueducts of ancient Peru. And all this
was done not by the forced labour of slaves or
captives, but as regularly paid work by the peasantry of the country, assisted to a large extent by the army.
The King maintained a large number of soldiers, in order that he might always be ready to cope with the border tribes ; but since their weapons were simple, and they needed comparatively little
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drill of any sort, they were available by far the greater part of the time for public service of other kinds. The entire charge of the repair of public works of all sorts was confided to their hands, and they also had to supply the constant stream of post-runners who were carrying reports and despatches, as well as private correspondence, all over the Empire. The maintenance of everything was supposed to be well within the power of the army ; but when a new road had to be made or a new fort built additional help was generally hired.
Of course it happened sometimes that war broke out with the less civilised tribes on the borders, but in the time of which we are writing these rarely gave any serious trouble. They were readily driven back, and penalties exacted from them; or sometimes, if they seemed amenable to a higher civilisation, their land was annexed to the Empire and they were brought under its regulations. Naturally there was some difficulty with such new citizens at first; they did not understand the customs and often did not see why they should comply with them; but after a short time most of them fell into the routine readily enough, and the incorrigible ones, who would not, were exiled into other countries not yet absorbed into the Empire.
These Peruvians were fairly humane in their wars ; as they were almost always victorious over the savage tribes this was comparatively easy for them. They had a saying : “ You should never be cruel to your enemy, because to-morrow he will be your friend.” In conquering the surrounding tribes they always endeavoured to do so with as
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little slaughter as possible, in order that the people might willingly come into the Empire, and make good citizens with a fraternal feeling towards their conquerors.
Their principal weapons were the spear, the sword and the bow, and they also made a con¬ siderable use of the bolas, an implement which is still employed by the South American Indians of the present day. It consists of two stone or metal balls joined by a rope, and is so thrown as to entangle the legs of a man or a horse, and bring him to the ground. When defending a fort they always rolled down great rocks on the assailants, and the building was specially arranged with a view to permitting this. The sword employed was a short one, more like a large knife, and it was used only when a man’s lance was broken, or when he was disarmed. They usually trusted to demoralising their foes by well-sustained flights of arrows, and then charged them with spears before they could recover.
The weapons were well made, for the people excelled in metal-work. They used iron, but did not know how to make it into steel, and it was less valuable to them than copper and various brasses and bronzes, because all these could be made exceedingly hard by alloying them with a form of their remarkable cement, whereas iron would not blend with it so perfectly. The result of this hardening process was remarkable, as even pure copper when subjected to it was capable of taking at least as fine an edge as our best steel, and there is little doubt that some of their alloys were
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186 MAN: WHENCE, HOW AND WHITHER
harder than any metal that we can produce at the present day.
Perhaps the most beautiful feature of their metal-work was its exceeding fineness and delicacy. Some of their engraving was truly wonderful — al¬ most too fine to be seen by the naked eye at all, at any rate by our modern eyes. Best of all, per¬ haps, was the marvellous gossamer-like filigree-work in which they so excelled ; it is impossible to under¬ stand how it could have been done without a
magnifying glass. Much of it was so indescribably delicate that it could not be cleaned at all in the ordinary way. It would have at once destroyed it to rub or dust it, no matter how carefully; so it had to be cleaned when necessary by means of a sort of blow-pipe.
Another manufacture which was rather a specialty was pottery. They contrived, by mixing some chemical with their clay, to turn it out a lovely ,rich crimson colour, and then they inlaid it
with gold and silver in a way which pro¬ duced effects that we have never seen else¬ where. Here again the exceeding delicacy of the lines was a matter of great wonder to us. Other fine colours were also obtained, and a further modification of that ever-useful flinty cement, when mixed with the prepared clay, gave it a trans¬ parency almost equal to that of our clearest glass. It
had also the great advantage of being far less
brittle than the glass of the present day ; indeed, there was much about it which suggested an ap¬ proach to the ‘malleable glass9 of which we some¬ times read as a mediaeval fable. They undoubtedly
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possessed the art of making a certain kind of thin porcelain which would bend without breaking, as will be seen when we come to deal with their literary achievements.
Since it was the custom of the nation to make so little use of wood, metal-work and pottery had to a great extent to take its place, and they did so with far greater success than we in these days should think possible. There is no doubt that the ancient Peruvians, in their constant researches into chemistry, had discovered some processes which are still a secret to our manufacturers; but as time goes on they will be rediscovered by this fifth Race also, and when once that happens, the press¬ ing need and competition of the present day will force their adaptation to all kinds of objects never dreamt of in old Peru.
The art of painting was practised to a considerable extent, and any child who showed special aptitude for it was encouraged to cultivate his talent to the utmost. The methods adopted were, however, quite different from our own, and their peculiar nature enormously increased the difficulty of the work. Neither can¬ vas, paper nor panel was used as a surface, but thin sheets of a sort of silicious material were employed instead. The exact composition of this was difficult to trace, but it had a delicate, creamy surface, closely resembling in appearance that of fine unglazed porcelain. It was not brittle, but could be bent much as a sheet of tin might be, and its thickness varied according to its size, from that of stout notepaper to that of heavy millboard.
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Upon this surface colours of great brilliancy and purity were laid with a brush supplied by Nature herself. It was simply a length cut from the triangular stem of a common fibrous plant. An inch or so at the end of this was beaten out until nothing was left but the fibre, fine as hair but almost as tough as wire ; and so the brush was used, the unbeaten portion serving as a handle. Such a brush could, of course, be renewed again and again when worn out, by a process analogous to cutting a lead-pencil ; the artist simply cut off the exposed fibre and beat out another inch of the handle. The sharply-defined triangular shape of this instrument enabled the skilful painter to use it either to draw a fine line or to put on a broad dash of colour, employing in the first case the corner, and in the second the side, of his triangle.
The colours were usually in powder, and were mixed as required, neither with water nor oil, but with some vehicle which dried instantaneously, so that a touch once laid on could not be altered. No out¬ line of any sort was drawn, but the artist had to train himself to dash in his effects with sure but rapid strokes, getting the exact tone of colour as well as the form in the one comprehensive effort, much as is done in fresco painting, or in some of the Japanese work. The colours were ex¬ ceedingly effective and luminous, and some of them surpassed in purity and delicacy any that are now employed. There was a wonderful blue, clearer than the finest ultramarine, and also a violet and a rose colour unlike any modern pigment, by means of which the indescribable glories of a sunset sky
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could be reproduced far more closely than seems to be possible at the present day. Ornaments of gold, silver and bronze, and of a metal of deep crimson colour which is not now known to science, were represented in a picture by the use of the dust of the metals themselves, much as in mediaeval illuminations ; and, bizarre as such a method seems to our modern eyes, it cannot be denied that it produced an effect of barbaric richness which was exceedingly striking in its own way.
The perspective was good, and the drawing accurate, and quite free from the clumsy crudity which characterised a later period of Central and South American art. Though their landscape art was distinctly good of its kind, at the time when we were studying them, they did not make it an end in itself, but employed it only as a background for figures. Religious processions were frequently chosen as subjects, or sometimes scenes in which the King or some local Governor took a prominent part.
When the picture was completed (and they were finished with remarkable rapidity by practised artists), it was brushed over with some varnish, which also possessed the property of drying almost instantaneously. The picture so treated was practical¬ ly indelible, and could be exposed to rain or sun for a long time without any appreciable effect being produced upon it.
Closely associated with the art of the country was its literature, for the books were written, or rather illuminated, on the same material and with the same kind of colours as the pictures. A book
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consisted of a number of thin sheets, usually measuring about eighteen inches by six, which were occasionally strung together by wire, but far more frequently simply kept in a box from three to five inches in depth. These boxes were of various materials and more or less richly ornament¬ ed, but the commonest were made of a metal resembling platinum, and adorned with carved horn, which was somehow fastened to the metal surface by some process of softening, which made it adhere firmly without the use of either rivets or cement.
So far as we could see, nothing of the nature of printing was known; the nearest approach to it was the use of a kind of stencil-plate to produce numerous copies of some sort of official notice for rapid distribution to the Governors all over the Empire. No instance has been observed, however, of any attempt to reproduce a book in this way ; and indeed it is evident that such an experiment would have been considered a desecration, for the nation as a whole had a deep respect for its books, and handled them as lovingly as any mediaeval monk. To make a copy of a book was regarded as decidedly a work of merit, and many of them were most beautifully and artistically written.
The range of their literature was somewhat limited. There were a few treatises which might have been classed as definitely religious, or at any rate ethical, and they ran mostly on lines not dissimilar from that of the old priest’s sermon, a summary of which was given in the preceding chapter. Two or three were even of distinctly mystical tendency, but these were less read and
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circulated than those which were considered more directly practical. The most interesting of these mystical books was one which so closely resembled the Chinese Classic of Purity , that there can be little doubt that it was a version of it with slight variations.
The bulk of the literature might be roughly divided into two parts — scientific information and stories with a purpose. Treatises or manuals existed on every trade or handicraft or art that was practised in the country, and these were of the nature of official handbooks — not usually the work of any one man, but rather a record of the knowledge existing on their subject at the time that they were written. Appendices were con¬ stantly issued to these books as further discoveries were made, or old ideas modified, and every person who possessed a copy kept it religiously altered and annotated up to date. As the Governors charged themselves with the dissemination of such information, they were able practically to ensure its reaching everyone who was interested in it ; thus the Peruvian monograph on any subject was a veritable compendium of useful knowledge about it, and gave the student in a condensed form the result of all the experience of 'his predecessors in that particular line.
The stories were almost all of one general type, and were distinctly, as I have said, stories with a purpose. All but invariably the hero was a King, a Governor, or a subordinate official, and the narrative told how he dealt successfully or otherwise with the various emergencies which
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presented themselves in the course of his work. Many of these stories were classics — household wTords to the people, as well known among them as biblical stories are among ourselves, constantly referred to and quoted as examples of what ought or ought not to be done. So in almost any conceivable predicament, the man who had to face it had in his mind some sort of precedent to guide his action. Whether all these tales were historical — whether they were all accounts of what had actually happened, or whether some of them were simply fiction — is not certain ; but there is no doubt that they were generally accepted as true.
When the scene of such a tale lay in a border province, plenty of wild adventure not in¬ frequently came into it ; but (happily for our friends the Peruvians) that wearisome bugbear of the modern novel-reader, the love-story, had not yet made its appearance among them. Many of the situations which arose in the tales were not without humour, and the nation was joyous and laughter-loving ; yet the professedly comic story had no place in its literature. Another and more regrettable gap is caused by the complete absence of poetry, as such. Certain maxims and expressions, couched in swinging, sonorous speech, were widely known and constantly quoted, much as some verses of poetry are with us ; but, however poetical some of the conceptions may have been, there was nothing definitely rhythmical about their form. “ Alliteration’s artful aid ” was invoked in the case of various short sentences which were given to children to memorise, and in the religious services certain phrases were
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chanted to music ; but even these latter were fitted into the chanting in the same way as we adapt the words of a psalm to the Gregorian tone to which it is sung, not written to suit a definite sort of music, as our hymns are.
This brings us to the consideration of the music of these ancient Peruvians. They had several varieties of musical instruments, among which were noticed a pipe and a kind of harp, from which a wild, sweet, inconclusive, asolian sort of melody was extracted. But their principal and most popular instru¬ ment was somewhat of the nature of a harmonium. The sound was produced by the vibration of a tongue of metal, but the wind was forced into the instrument not by the action of the feet, but by an ingenious mechanical arrangement. Instead of keys such as ours, appeared the tops of a cluster of small metal pillars, upon which the fingers of the player pressed, so that a performance upon it irresistibly reminded one of the action of a modern typewriter.
Considerable power and great beauty of ex¬ pression were attainable with this machine, but the old Peruvian scale in music was the same as that of Atlantis, and it differed so radically from our own that it is almost impossible for us rightly to appreciate the effects produced by its means. So far as we could see no such thing as a piece of music, which could be written down and repro¬ duced by anyone at will, was known to these people ; each performer improvised for himself, and musical skill among them was not the ability to interpret the work of a master, but simply fertility and
resource in improvisation.
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Sculpture also was an art fairly well developed among them, though one would perhaps characterise their style rather as bold, dashing and effective than as excelling in grace. Nearly all statues seem to have been of colossal size, and some of them were un¬ doubtedly stupendous pieces of work ; but to eyes accus¬ tomed to the contemplation of Grecian art, there is a certain air of ruggedness in the massive strength of the old Peruvian sculpture. Fine work was, however, done in bas-relief ; this was almost always covered with metal, for the genius of this people turned especially in the direction of metal¬ work — a line in which the most exquisite decorations were constantly produced.
In connection with the daily life of the nation, and its manners and customs, there are some points which at once attract our attention as unusual and interesting. Their marriage customs, for example, were decidedly peculiar, for marriages took place on only one day in each year. Public opinion expected everyone to marry, unless he had good reason to the contrary, but there was nothing that could be thought of as compulsion in the matter. The marriage of minors was prohibited, but as soon as young people came of age they were as free to choose their own partners as they are among ourselves. The wedding, however, could not take place until the proper day arrived, when the Governor of the district or town made a formal visitation, and all young people who had attained the marriageable age during the previous year were called up before him, and officially notified that they were now free to enter upon the state of
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matrimony. Some proportion of these had usually already made up their minds to take immediate advantage of the opportunity ; they therefore stepped forward before the Governor and preferred their request, and he, after asking a few questions, went through a simple form and pronounced them man and wife. He also made an order rectifying the assignment of land to suit the new circumstances, for the newly-married man and woman now no longer counted as members of their respective fathers5 families, but as full-fledged householders on their own account. The married man had therefore twice as much land of his own as the single man, but even so he rarely found the work connected with it at all excessive.
A peculiarity was observed in connection with the principal food of the nation. The people took, of course, various kinds of food, just as men do now. We do not know whether animal flesh was prohibited, but it certainly was not eaten at the period which we were examining. The potato and yam were cultivated, and maize, rice, and milk in various combinations entered largely into their diet. They had, however, one curious and highly artificial kind of food which might have been called their staff of life — which took with them somewhat the place that bread takes with us, as the principal foundation of most of their meals. The basis of this was maize-flour, but various chemical constituents were mixed with it, and the resultant subjected to enormous pressure, so that it came out at the end of the operation as a hard and highly concentrated cake. Its components were
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carefully arranged, in order that it might contain within itself everything that was necessary for perfect nutrition in the smallest possible compass ; and the experiment was so far successful that a tiny slice of it made sufficient provision for a whole day, and a man could carry with him a supply of food for a long journey without the slightest inconvenience.
The simplest method of taking it was to suck it slowly like a lozenge, but, if time permitted, it could be boiled or cooked in various ways, all of which largely increased its bulk. Of itself it had scarcely any taste, but it was the custom to flavour it in various ways in the process of manufacture, and these varieties of flavour were indicated by different colours. A pink cake, for example, was flavoured with pomegranate, a blue one with vanilla, a yellow one with orange, a pink and white striped one with guava, and so on, so that every one’s taste might be suited.
This curiously compressed sweetmeat was the staple food of the country, and large numbers of people took practically nothing else, even though there were plenty of other dishes from which to select. It was manufactured in such enormous quantities that it was exceedingly cheap and easily within everybody’s reach, and for busy people it had many and obvious advantages. Many fruits were cultivated, and people who liked them took them along with their lozenge, but all these additions were matters of taste and not of necessity.
The race as a whole was fond of pet animals of various kinds, and in the course of ages they
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had specialised and developed these creatures to an extraordinary degree. Small monkeys and cats were perhaps the most general favourites, and there were many fancy varieties of each, bred almost as much out of all relation to the original creature as are the deformities called dachshunds at the present day. In regard to the cats, they made a great speciality of unusual colours, and they had even succeeded in breeding some of that colour which is so conspicuously absent among quadrupeds — a fairly decided and brilliant blue !
Many people were fond of birds also, as might be expected in a continent where so many magni¬ ficently coloured specimens are to be found; indeed, it is by no means impossible that we owe to their care in breeding some of the splendid varieties of bird-life that now inhabit the forests of the Amazon. Some of the richer ladies had huge aviaries with golden wires in the courtyards of their houses, and devoted all their spare time to the endeavour to cultivate the intelligence and affection of their pets.
The national dress was simple and scanty — just a sort of loose flowing garment not at all unlike some of those that are worn in the East in the present day, except that the old Peruvian wore less white and was more addicted to colour than is the average Indian of the present day. A Peruvian crowd on a festal occasion was an exceedingly brilliant sight, perhaps only to be par¬ alleled now among the Burmese. The ladies as a rule exhibited a partiality for blue robes, and a dress closely resembling that often assigned by
198 MAN: WHENCE, HOW AND WHITHER
mediaeval painters to the Virgin Mary was one of the commonest at the time of which we are writing. The material was usually cotton, though the fine soft wool of the llama and vicuna was also sometimes used. A sort of cloth of great strength was made from the threads of the maguey, which were chemically treated in some way to
make them fit for such use.
The nation had all the facility in the use of purely mechanical methods of rapid calculation which is so characteristic of the Atlantean Race. They employed an abacus, or calculating-frame, closely resembling that used to-day with such dex¬ terity by the Japanese, and they also made a cheaper substitute for such a frame out of a kind of fringe of knotted cord, which may perhaps be the original of the quipus , which the Spaniards
found in use in the same country thousands of years later.
In studying an ancient civilisation like this, so many points of interest crop up — points of resemblance or of contrast with the life of our own time — that the difficulty is rather to decide what to omit, in trying to give an account of it, than what to include. We cannot convey to our readers the sense of vivid reality which it all bears to those
of us who have seen it, but we trust that for
some few at least we have been not entirely un¬ successful in making this long-dead past live again for a few brief moments. And. be it remembered that we ourselves — many of us who are now living and working in the Theosophical Society — were born at this very time among the inhabitants of
TWO ATLANTEAN CIVILISATIONS 199
old Peru ; many dear friends whom we know and love now were friends or relations in that far-off time also ; so that the memory of all this that we have tried to describe must lie dormant, deep down within the causal bodies of many of our readers, and it is by no means impossible that in some of them that memory may gradually be revived by quietly thinking over the description. If any should be thus successful, they will realise how curious and interesting it is to look back into those long-
forgotten lives, and see what we have gained and
what we have failed to gain since then.1
At first sight it looks as though in many important ways there had been rather retrogression than advance. The physical life, with all its sur¬ roundings, was undoubtedly better managed then, than, so far as we know, it has ever been
since. The opportunities for unselfish work and
devotion to duty which were offered to the govern¬ ing class have perhaps never been surpassed ; still it must be admitted that nothing in the way of mental struggle or effort was necessary for the less intelligent classes, though when it did show itself it was richly rewarded.
Undoubtedly the condition of public opinion is not so high, nor is the sense of duty so strong, now as it was then. But the comparison is in truth hardly a fair one. We are as yet a com¬ paratively young Race, whereas that which we have been examining was one of the most glorious off¬ shoots of a Race that had long passed its prime. We are passing now, because of our ignorance, ^ee Appendix IV.
200 MAN: WHENCE, HOW AND WHITHER
through a period of trial, storm, and stress, but out of it all we too shall, in time, when we have developed a little common-sense, emerge into a season of rest and success, and when that time comes to us, it ought, by the law of evolution, to reach an even higher level than theirs.
We must remember that, beautiful as was their religion, they had, so far as we know, nothing that could really be called Occultism ; they had no such grasp of the great scheme of the universe as we have who are privileged to study Theosophy. When our fifth Root Race reaches the same stage of its life, we may assuredly hope to combine physical surroundings as good as theirs with true philosophical teaching, and with a higher intel¬ lectual and spiritual development than was possible for us when we formed part of that splendid old relic of Atlantean civilisation, fourteen thousand years ago.