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The celestial pair, brother and sister, husband and wife, advanced along the high plains in the neighborhood of Lake Titicaca, to about the sixteenth degree south. They bore with them a golden wedge, and were directed to take up their residence on the spot where the sacred emblem should without effort sink into the ground.
Lake Titicaca is generally held to have been the cradle of the race, and it is in this neighbourhood and on the shores of the lake that some of the most notable of the Inca ruins are to be met with. There is no doubt that the great majority of these stupendous monuments of a former age were not the actual handiwork of the Incas.
It is said by those who have studied the matter, that this civilisation existed long before the coming of the Incas. On this point I can say nothing, but no doubt or uncertainty rests on the later history of this race. Cuzco, on Lake Titicaca, became the capital city of a great and flourishing monarchy, and possessed many splendid buildings in spacious squares and streets.
But at least the landlord loaned me a pair of trunks for a moonlight swim in Lake Chapala, whispering some secret to its sandy beaches in the silence of the silver-flooded night. It is the largest lake in Mexico, second indeed only to Titicaca among the lofty sheets of water of the Western world. More than five thousand feet above the sea, it is shallow and stormy as Lake Erie.
The Cordilleras of Ancuma and Moquehua, and the longitudinal valley, or rather the basin of Titicaca, which they inclose, take a direction north 42 degrees west. Further on, the two branches again unite in the group of the mountains of Cuzco, and thence their direction is north 80 degrees west.
Alvarado the new governor, began the exercise of his authority in the city of La Paz, where he tried a number of rebel soldiers who had concealed themselves on the borders of the lake of Titicaca, whence they had been brought prisoners by Pedro de Encisco. Some of these were hanged, some beheaded, others banished, and others condemned to the gallies.
In judging the attitude of mind of the natives of Titicaca one should remember that they live under most trying conditions of climate and environment. During several months of the year everything is dried up and parched. The brilliant sun of the tropics, burning mercilessly through the rarefied air, causes the scant vegetation to wither. Then come torrential rains.
"Anyway," Jack insisted, "it takes us away up into the Andes, almost to Lake Titicaca, and that's all any stream will do. As for the falls and rapids, do you expect any stream to creep down from that great plateau without jumping off occasionally?" "All right," Frank cut in. "Go your own way to destruction!
As the Incas increased in power they invented various myths to account for their origin. One of these traced their ancestry to the islands of Lake Titicaca. Finally the very location of Manco Ccapac's birthplace was forgotten by the common people although undoubtedly known to the priests and those who preserved the most sacred secrets of the Incas.
At length, although the Inca's armies had suffered sorely, we forced those of Urco to the shores of the Lake Titicaca, where most of them melted away into the swamps and certain tree-clad, low-lying valleys. Urco himself, however, with a number of followers, escaped in boats to the holy island in the lake. We built a fleet of balsas with reeds and blown-out sheepskins, and followed him.
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