Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/170

170 entrance to one of these royal passages. The floor is paved with tile. He went back as far as he could go without suffocating. The air is too stale and there is considerable danger of caverns. The Incans were very clever, but I don't believe at all that they had the means to bore tunnels for thousands of miles through the mountains. Rather, if they covered such distances underground, it can only mean that their man-made passages were only entrances into a series of caverns. After earthquakes in the hills and in Lima (as long as twenty minutes after) you can sometimes hear subterranean rumblings, as though the sound were the result of subterranean landslides in deep caverns below. Indeed one time in Lima I heard a subterranean landslide without the accompaniment of earthquake. The ground merely vibrated in a light and curious fashion for perhaps a minute, to the accompaniment of the muffled, subterranean sound of sliding rocks. Ask the Indians in the hills. They'll tell you at once about the rumblings under ground.

The most interesting phase of the study of antiquities is the legends among many races of people concerning extra-terrestrial origins. The Cara-Mayas believed in a sort of Snake Mother (this calls to mind Merritt's "Face in the Abyss") descended from the stars (Naga). The Incas strongly supported the idea of their origin in the sun. Mr. Hansen has told us much about the ancients' repeated reference to flying machines.

Here is a hypothesis which I believe is original, merely because I have not read of a similar idea anywhere else. Take it for what it's worth. Science says that hair and feathers evolved from scales. If this is true, it means that occurrence of hair in a race of human beings would be correlated with proximity to the ape and earlier forms. Let us consider the case of Indian and Polynesian races, precisely those of whom it has been suspected that they belong to the older races which existed before the Diluvium. They are characterized by a very infrequent occurrence of bodily hair. Chest, arms, legs and face are practically free of hair, in the Polynesian, the present day Quichuas of Peru, the North American Indians, and many other peoples not belonging to the vaunted Aryan line. Ourselves, however, are too often characterized by bushy arms, legs, chests and backs of an almost atavistic degree! (Don't get sore, fellows, I'm just as much a monkey as anybody.) Question: Who is closer to the ape?

There is just the faint possibility that those people whom we Aryans, with our puny historical tradition of a few millenniums, have considered as "primitive" are actually the lost and scattered children of ancient, superior races who evolved on other worlds "when you were a tadpole and I was a fish!"

The snake symbol is interesting in this regard. Some say that it was often used to represent the "waters." In other cases it was symbolic of forbidden knowledge (Eve and the Serpent). So if an ancient people have a legend about a serpent