Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/119

Rh The Prince was the builder of the empire, the foundations of which were laid by Rocca. The elaborate religious ceremonial, the methods of recording events, the military organisation, the self-working social system were his work. It may seem incredible that the whole fabric of Andean civilisation should be the work of one man, and it would be if he had created it. But Cusi was not the creator. He was the the reformer. Over all the regions that he conquered there were the same ideas and habits of thought, and of living, dialects of the same original language, and the same faint memories of an almost forgotten past. Pachacuti worked upon these materials with the skill and foresight of a profound statesman. His grand object was attained, for he welded together a homogeneous empire with such masterly thoroughness in all its complicated details that its machinery worked almost automatically.

Pachacuti was a great conqueror as well as a great administrator. The immediate consequence of the final victory over the Chancas and of the disruption of their confederacy was the addition of a vast territory to the land of the Incas. The country beyond the Apurimac, between that