Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/262

252 be the real basis of fact in the accounts of the Virgins of the Sun and the feast of Raymi, the inference seems, to me at least, most probable, that part or all of the accessory detail is not history, but the realization of an idea of which Garcilaso himself strikes the key-note when he says of this same feast of Raymi, that it was celebrated by the Incas "in the city of Cozco, which was another Rome" (que fue otra Roma). Those who happen to have experience of the old chroniclers of Spanish America know how the whole race was possessed by a passion for bringing out the Old World stories in a new guise, with a local habitation and a name in America. Garcilaso's story of the burning-mirror, supposing it to be an adaptation from Plutarch, would not even be the best illustration of this modern phase of Mythology; that distinction must be reserved for the reproduction by another chronicler of another of Plutarch's stories, that of the shout that was raised when the Roman Herald proclaimed the liberty of the Greeks,—such a shout that it brought the crows tumbling down into the racecourse from the sky above. The Incas, says Sarmiento, "were so feared, that if they went out through the kingdom, and allowed a curtain of their litters to be lifted that their vassals might see them, they raised so great an acclamation that they made the birds fall from where they were flying above, so that the people could catch them in their hands."

Against the abstract possibility of Garcilaso's story of the lighting of the sacred fire with concave mirrors, there is no more to be said than against Plutarch's. With a good parabolic mirror only two inches in diameter, I have lighted brown paper under an English sun of no extraordinary power, and other surfaces which will make a good caustic will answer, though of course they have less burning power than a paraboloid of revolution of equal size. There is even a material basis out of which the Peruvian story may have grown. In the ancient tombs of Peru, mirrors both of pyrites and obsidian have been found. Some, three or four inches in diameter, were probably mere broken nodules of pyrites, polished on the flat side, but