ANCIENT PERU.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 45, 17 October 1912, Page 4

ANCIENT PERU.

It lias niton been suggested that the ancient Peruvians possessed a eivili-

sation much older than that which the Spanish conquest terminated, and quite J lately particulars of a discovery allegedly made by two engineers who journeyed inland from the Uayali Hirer, support this belief. Tnese travellers were in pursuit of game, which they intended for fresh meat for their ship. Quite near one hank of the river a clearing was noticed amongst the dense growth winch fringed the stream, and something resembling a stone wall was seen. Such an object was extremely strange in the middle of a dense jungle, hundreds of miles from the nearest village, and it was decided to investigate. At the bottom of a small foothill the engineer and his friend found a wall about twenty-five feet high and two hundred feet long. It had apparently been made of red clay, but ages of tropical heat and rains had turned it to a greenish hue. Along the top of the wall at regular intervals were

large ornamental vases of the same material as the wall. A ladder was improvised, and the explorers reached the top of the wall. They found it was part of a vast enclosure, filled to within a few feet of the top with human skeletons, millions in number. A photograph was taken of the weird scene, and archaeologists who have inspected it assert that the vases which decorate the wall are not of Aztec design at all, but characteristically Persian. The annals of South American archaeology throw no light on the mystery of how this huge pit of bones came to be constructed or of the nation that constructed it. When one remembers that the Parsees dispose of their dead by depositing the bodici on gratings at the top of huge towers, there is a probability that the fore-

runners of the Aztecs were of Persian origin.