Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/246

208 infinite variety of their pottery, and the patterns of their cotton cloths, all point to a race which had reached a high state of civilisation. A grammar, composed by a descendant of one of Pizarro's followers over a century after the Spanish conquest, has preserved some knowledge of their otherwise lost language, but of their history we know absolutely nothing. We only learn from the Spanish historians of the Incas that the sovereign of the coast people, called by them the Grand Chimu, was subdued by the Incas about four generations before the Spaniards came, and that he possessed great riches. Nothing more. There is only one tradition preserved, and that does not refer to the Chimu, but to his feudatories in the Lambayeque valley.

The kernel of the Chimu problem is in the ruins between the Spanish town of Truxillo and the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Here the Chicama and Muchi rivers combine to form a wide extent of cultivable land, which is situated in the centre of the northern coast valleys, having eight on the north and eight on the south side of it. The vast extent of the ruins shows that this was the