Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/130



This ancient ruined city is Machu Picchu, fortress city of a powerful empire. It was the Rome of early America and its importance is as great, if not greater, than that of Rome in the European sphere. It seems to have been from this city that "the foot-steps of the Southerners echoed throughout the new land" as is told in that famed old manuscript, the Chilam Balam. The phrase invoices great wonderment when one traces the thread of the northern civilizations back along roads leading south.

Pictured here is the modern descendant of the ancient Inca. The idea that the pre-Incan civilization goes back some 18,000 years is possible, but the Inca himself goes back brilliantly for as much as three thousand years, even beyond the chronology of Montesinos.

The extent of the Incan Empire is shown here, extending along the western side of the continent, just under the "bulge of the upper and main segment of South America. Shown also the different cultures nations absorbed by them in their northward march. The Chimu and the Maxca cultures were overwhelmed.

The Spaniard, Montesinos, a scholar, imbued with the desire to learn what he could of the vanished empire before it was too late, tramped the entire continent over, seeking the old readers of the quippus, who had been the historians and the sons of historians. From records long vanished, and others destined to vanish, he learned of the Incas' rise.