Page:Gaston Leroux--The bride of the sun.djvu/63

Rh To understand what Dick and Maria-Teresa had been among the first to see, it is necessary for the reader to know that it was customary among the Incas to shape living skulls to any form they wished. This strange custom exists even in modern days, though in a far lesser degree, among the Basque inhabitants of the Pyrenees. The skulls of babies, set in vices or bound into various molds, were gradually deformed till they took the shape of a sugar-loaf, of a squarish box, of an enormous lime, and so forth. Phrenology was evidently a science known to the Incas, who, precursors of Gall and Spezhurn, thus sought to develop abnormally the intellectual or warlike qualities of a child by compressing or enlarging such and such a part of the brain. It has been proved, though, that this practise was allowed only in the case of children of the Inca himself, called upon in afterlife to take high position in the State. The common people kept their normal skulls and normal brains.

Of the three heads just brought to light, one was cuneiform—a monstrous sugar-loaf. It was horrible to see this nightmare face, like the head of a beast of the Apocalypse, framed in locks which seemed to be still living as they gently moved in the sea breeze. The second head was flattened out, cap-like, with a huge