Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/600

584 584 PERUVIAN ARCHITECTURE. Part in. and to live together in communities ; and made for them such laws and regulations as were requisite for these purposes. Like the Indian Bacchus, Manco Capac was after his death reverenced as a god, and his descendants, the Incas, were considered as of divine origin, and worshipped as children of the Sun, which was the great object of Peruvian adoration. At the time of the Spanish conquest the twelfth descendant of Manco Capac was on the throne, but, his father having married as one of his wives a woman of the Indian race, the prestige of the purity of Inca blood was tarnished, and the country was torn by civil Avars, Avhich greatly facilitated the progress of the Spaniards in their conquests under the unscrupulous Pizarro. 1010. Ruins of House of Mancf> Capac, in Cuzco. (From a Sketch by J. B. Pentland.) Both from its style and the traditions attached to it, the oldest building of the Incas seems to be that called the house of Manco Capac, on an island in the Lake of Titicaca. The part shown in the Avoodcut (No. 1010) is curvilinear in form, standing on a low terrace, and surmounted by upper chambers, hardly deserving the name of tOAvers. All the doorways have sloping jambs, and the masonry is of rude, irregular polygonal blocks of no great size. Inside the wall are a number of small square chambers, lighted only from the door- way. A more adA'anced specimen of building, though inferior in masonry^ is the two-storied edifice called the House of the Nuns, or of the Virgins of the Sun, in the same place (Woodcut No. 1011). It is nearly square in plan, though with low projecting wings on one side.