LOST INCA CITY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 10 August 1928, Page 4

LOST INCA CITY

THE reported discovery of a lost Inca city may appear fantastic as told in a cablegram sent from Lima on the Bth inst., but as a matter of fact there is in reality nothing incompatible with truth in such/ an announcement. The Incas. lived and rilled in South America for hundreds, probably thousands,' of years prior to the Spanish conquest, in 1533, and it was their custom to build and abandon cities in a manner-which is, scarcely comprehensible in modem limes. "On the- decease of an Inca"—thatj is to say, of a king or;head of the-great Inca ftimily or clan—"his palaces were, abandoned," Ave read in Prescott, "all, his treasures, except what were employed,in his obsequies, his furniture and'apparel, Were suffered to remain as he left them, and his mansions, save one, were closed up for ever. The new sovereign was* to provide himself with everything new for his royal state. The reason of this was the popular belief that the soul of the departed monarch would return after a time to re-animate his body on'earth; and they wished that he should find everything to which he had been used in life prepared for his reception." The result of this was that every Inca monarch, and there were'hundreds of them, built a city and: perhaps several cities-.for himself,; and there must have been in existence; at the time of the Spanish conquest, many abandoned and empty cities such as have been referred to, in which the conquerors found enormous booty 1 Possibly the city, which is reported to have been discovered by the members of a scientific expedition, may be an empty city, abandoned on the death of some Inca many centuries agOy and since entered by neither ancient Peruvian, Spaniard, nor modern Peruvian. If so, its discovery will, add immensely to present-day knowledge of an ancient and intensely interesting race which was'contemporary with the ancient; Egyptians, and 1 whose civilisation vanished under the hand of the/ruthless Spaniard four hundred years ago.