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If old Saylla represents a fortress set here to defend Cuzco against old Oropesa, it might very naturally have been abandoned when the rule of the Incas finally spread far over the Andes.
It was situated among the lower ranges of the lofty Cordilleras, one of those mighty ranges of mountains which stretches from one end to the other of the South American continent, the eastern portion of them being more properly known by the name of the Andes. Our house stood on a level spot on the summit of a spur of the main chain.
The mountain spur sloped away steeply from their feet, plunging down until it was lost in a wide, densely wooded ravine about a mile in width, beyond which the ground again rose somewhat irregularly in a wide sweep of upland, gradually merging into foothills which, viewed from that distance, appeared to be the advance guard of the towering Andes.
The Inca Garcilasso, who was the son of a Peruvian princess, and who wrote the history of his native country in the first years of the conquest, gives no etymology of the name of the Andes. The etymology of the name of the largest mountain chain of the globe cannot be devoid of interest to the mineralogic geographer.
At the same time, to keep his troops in exercise, he reduced the neighbouring nations to obedience, had some forts built, and again sailing up the Paraguay he reached Potosi, and the water-courses of the Andes which feed the basin of the Atlantic.
He started it again but ill, blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment in the mines; but the story he told begot a legend that lingers along the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to this day. He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness, into which he had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of gear, when he was a child.
Brought up in a wigwam, no doubt, among the simple aborigines of the Pampas, or the mountains yes, it must have been the mountains, for the Incas of Peru dwelt in the Andes." He paused here for a few minutes and sauntered on in silence, while a tinge of perplexity mingled with the frown.
Paulo I had a serious illness, an attack of the "sizoens," or ague of the country, which, as it left me with shattered health and damped enthusiasm, led to my abandoning the plan I had formed of proceeding to the Peruvian towns of Pebas and Moyobamba, 250 and 600 miles further west, and so completing the examination of the Natural History of the Amazonian plains up to the foot of the Andes.
Carl Hagenbeck wrote me only three months ago that "the condors of the Andes are all being exterminated for their feathers, and these birds are now very difficult to obtain." The egret and heron plumes, known under the trade name of "osprey, etc., feathers," form by far the most important item in each feather sale. There are fifteen grades!
"We associate the name of Humboldt with oceans, continents, mountains, volcanoes with towering palms the snow-lipped craters of the Andes the wide deserts with primeval forests and European capitals with wilderness and universities with savages and savants with the lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes with peaks, pampas, steppes, cliffs and crags with the progress of the world with every science known to man and with every star glittering in the immensity of space.
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