Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/252

214 flora of the coast, but also the manners and customs of the people, are depicted or modelled on their vases. There are met with various kinds of fruits and vegetables, shells, fish, lizards, deer, monkeys, parrots and other birds, and a sea-lion with a fish in its mouth. In short, there are countless varieties of forms and combinations, hardly two specimens alike. By far the most interesting are the human heads. Some are almost majestic, and are evidently portraits. Others show the face distorted in pain, others smiling or singing, some with a rapt expression as in a trance. There are also figures playing on musical instruments, others spinning. Some vases represent a human hand, others a foot showing how sandals were worn. Architecture, the arts, customs, and religious ideas are depicted. Squier describes one scene of a chief seated in the verandah of a house with a high-pitched roof, raised on four terraces. The chief has a plumed head-dress, a lance in one hand and a drinking-cup in the other. A long procession is approaching, with persons singing and playing on cymbals, tambourines, Pandean-pipes, and trumpets of clay. Another vase has a foot-race painted round it. There is another showing a combat between a serpent-warrior and a crab-warrior, perhaps a legend of a contest between land and sea. There is a vase with winged figures, and another very remarkable one, in the British Museum, of a winged warrior in the act of flying.