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They were fairly "glued to their resting places"; clustered so closely in some cases as to give the stems of the bushes a ghostly appearance. Our present objective was the valley of the river Vilcabamba. So far as we have been able to learn, only one other explorer had preceded us the distinguished scientist Raimondi. His map of the Vilcabamba is fairly accurate.
The subject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, and popularly called, or rather miscalled, the Dream of Raphael, is recognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione. She will not yield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this love is the most shameful treason to father and people.
It was their discovery in 1572 or thereabouts which brought Ocampo and the first Spanish settlers to this valley. Raimondi says that he found here cobalt, nickel, silver-bearing copper ore, and lead sulphide. He does not mention any gold-bearing quartz. It may have been exhausted long before his day.
This ignorance led the Peruvian geographers Raimondi and Paz Soldan to conclude that Choqquequirau, the only ruins reported between the Apurimac and the Urubamba, must have been the capital of the Incas who took refuge there.
But much good music is quite beyond the reach of the public Palestrina's best motetts, airs by Alessandro Stradella, the famous hymn of Raimondi, in short a great musical library, an 'archivio' as the Romans call such a collection, all of which is practically lost to the world. It is wonderful that under such circumstances the choir of Saint Peter's should obtain even such creditable results.
Guido cared more for rare engravings and etchings than for pictures, and a few very fine framed prints stood on the big writing table; there was Dürer's Melancholia, and the Saint Jerome, and the Little White Horse, and the small Saint Anthony, and Rembrandt's Three Trees, all by itself, as the most wonderful etching in the world deserved to be; and here and there, about the room, were a few good engravings by Martin Schöngauer, and by Mantegna, and by Marcantonio Raimondi.
About two leagues above Paltaybamba, at or near the spot called by Raimondi "Maracnyoc," an "abandoned tampu," we came to some old stone walls, the ruins of a place now called Huayara or "Hoyara."
Only a few years after Mantegna's death, Albert Dürer, the great painter engraver of Nüremberg, appeared before the council of Venice to try and get a copyright for his engravings, which were being so cleverly forged by the famous Raimondi that the copies were sold in the Piazza of Saint Mark as originals.
When Raimondi was here in 1865 it was but a "wretched hamlet with a paltry chapel." To-day it is more prosperous. There is a large public school here, to which children come from villages many miles away. So crowded is the school that in fine weather the children sit on benches out of doors. The boys all go barefooted. The girls wear high boots.
This road avoids the necessity of carrying the precious cargoes over the dangerous snowy passes of Mt. Veronica and Mt. Salcantay, so vividly described by Raimondi, de Sartiges, and others. The road, however, was very expensive, took years to build, and still requires frequent repair.
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