Early Peruvian Culture The topography of primitive Mexico was
impressive enough: a low-lying Atlantic seaboard; a gradual rise
through tropical vegetation and life to a plateau seventy-four
hundred feet above sea-level; guarding this plateau, a mountain
wall accentuated by twin volcanic peaks seventeen thousand feet
high; and within the wall, covering the plateau in considerable
part, a cluster of lakes fresh and salt. But magnificent as was
the Mexican scenery, in Peru, Nature, overpassing the
impressive, became stupendous and sublime. The Peru of the Incas
at the coming of Pizarro stretched along the Pacific coast of
South America from the River Ancasmayu, north of Quito in
Ecuador, to the River Maule, below Santiago in Chile, a region
some twenty-seven hundred miles in length and comprehending the
modern States of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, with part of Chile
and Argentina. Its main features within the limits of Peru
proper — the Peru of today — were an arid ocean strand less than
one hundred miles in bre