at a hand loom in his courtyard and whom we desired to photograph.  She could not easily escape, for she was sitting on the ground with one end of the loom fastened around her waist, the other end tied to a eucalyptus tree.  So she covered her eyes and mouth with her hands, and almost wept with mortification at our strange procedure.  Peruvian Indian women are invariably extremely shy, rarely like to be photographed, and are anxious only to escape observation and notice.  The ladies of the gobernador’s own family, however, of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry, not only had no objection to being photographed, but were moved to unseemly and unsympathetic laughter at the predicament of their unfortunate sister.

After leaving Lampa we found ourselves on the best road that we had seen in a long time.  Its excellence was undoubtedly due to the enterprise and energy of the people of this pleasant town.  One might expect that citizens who kept their town so clean and neat and were engaged in the unusual act of constructing new irrigation works would have a comfortable road in the direction toward which they usually would wish to go, namely, toward the coast.

As we climbed out of the Huancahuanca Valley we noticed no evidences of ancient agricultural terraces, either on the sides of the valley or on the alluvial plain which has given rise to the town of Lampa and whose products have made its people well fed and energetic.  The town itself seems to be of modern origin.  One wonders why there are so few, if any, evidences of the ancient regime when there are so many a short distance away in Colta and the valley around it.  One cannot believe that the Incas would have overlooked such a fine agricultural opportunity as an extensive alluvial terrace in a region where there is so little arable land.  Possibly the very excellence of the land and its relative flatness rendered artificial terracing unnecessary in the minds of the ancient people who lived here.  On the other hand, it may have been occupied until late Inca times by one of the coast tribes.  Whatever the cause, certainly the deep canyon of Huancahuanca divides two very different regions.  To come in a few hours, from thickly terraced Colta to unterraced Lampa was so striking as to give us cause for thought and speculation.  It is well known that in the early days before the Inca conquest of Peru, not so very long before the Spanish Conquest, there were marked differences between the tribes who inhabited the high plateau and those who lived along the shore of the Pacific.  Their pottery is as different as possible in design and ornamentation; the architecture of their cities and temples is absolutely distinct.  Relative abundance of flat lands never led them to develop terracing to the same extent that the mountain people had done.  Perhaps on this alluvial terrace there lived a remnant of the coastal peoples.  Excavation would show.