Page:A history of Chile.djvu/41

Rh spoke the same language and bore general physical resemblance to each other. They were all men of great strength, those of the mountains exceeding the ordinary height of man, so that at Cuzco they spoke of "Atacama giants." Their complexion was reddish brown, the typical Indian color, but of a lighter hue than that of other Indians. One tribe, indeed, is spoken of as being nearly white.

As in Peru, so also there, Almagro and his conquistadores beheld substantial aqueducts for watering the fields, which were fertilized and highly cultivated. Though the Chilean plow was a mere wooden spade, yet so industrious were the people that they grew immense crops of maize, potatoes, magu, guegan, tuca, pulses of all kinds, and various other plants and vegetables. They had domesticated a rabbit and the Araucanian camel, and tradition says they had pigs and fowls, but tradition is not always reliable. They cooked all their food, made bread, using a sieve to sift their meal and leaven to raise their dough. They used nearly a dozen different kinds of spirituous liquors, and were as habituated to drunkenness as the Peruvians. They had no large cities, as had the Peruvians and Mexicans, but gathered themselves together in patriarchal hamlets, each of which was ruled by a chief, or ulmen, who in turn was subject to a supreme cacique holding power over the whole tribe. The right of private property was everywhere recognized. Each farmer was absolute master of the field he cultivated and he could transmit it to his children; this was unlike the Peruvian paternal system, where the soil was considered to be the Inca's by divine and paternal right and was by him apportioned in topus to his subjects. Here, in fact, was the radical difference between that wonderful paternal system, which had