Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/848

826 evening, passed under the earth, and reappeared twelve hours afterward in the opposite part of the horizon.

The god himself was represented in sculpture, according to M. Wiener, in statues of gold or reddish-brown porphyry, with "his forehead encircled by the royal fillet in the midst of four fabulous animals moving around him." The same author, on the evidence of some monuments resembling the menhirs of the Druids, gives another explanation of the circular motion of the sun. "It is regarded," he says, "as a being which comes to rest at night after its daily march, in the inaccessible inclosure of the sanctuary (called by a Quichua term signifying the place to which the sun is attached). The holy object consists of two granite blocks about a metre in height, on the inner faces of which have been found holes about fifteen centimetres deep and nine centimetres in diameter." This was narrow quarters for a star as voluminous as the sun! We shall find further on that M. Wiener gives the same name to a system of observatories. The illustrious Peruvianologist has confused this word with the identical one which represents the year in the Quichua language.

The earth was believed to be flat and circular, and the center of it was shown in the sanctuary of Cuzco, the name of which, according to Garcilaso, signifies umbilicus, or navel. The Greeks had a similar belief, and located the center of the earth in the Temple of Apollo, another solar deity, at Delphi, which they called ΟμΦαλος, the navel of the inhabited world. It is celebrated under that title in some of the Pythian odes of Pindar. The earth, the Indian name of which signified "everywhere," was the only one of the stars that had no sanctuary in the Temple of the Sun. Like the peoples of the Aryan race, the Incas did not suspect that it was endowed with motion. Only the revolution of the stars existed to them; and the earth, instead of being a planet suspended in space, gravitating round the sun, and turning upon itself, was supposed to be fixed in the midst of a moving celestial sphere.

When the moon was eclipsed the Incas supposed that it was ill, and uneasiness prevailed whenever it appeared obscured. If the eclipse was total, they supposed that the star was perhaps dead, and that, not being capable of maintaining itself in space, it would fall to the earth, crushing the poor mortals thereon and that the world would come to an end. For this reason when an eclipse of the moon was beginning—an event they were not able to predict—the Incas with such instruments as were within their reach—drums, trumpets, cymbals, etc.—made a frightful noise, and, tying up their dogs, tormented them so as to extort the most hideous cries from them, in the hope that the moon, being a friend of dogs, would be softened by their howling and try to return to life. Men, women, and children joined with their princes