famous Sunday market.  Many native “druggists” were present.  Their stock usually consisted of “medicines,” whose efficacy was learned by the Incas.  There were forty or fifty kinds of simples and curiosities, cure-alls, and specifics.  Fully half were reported to me as being “useful against fresh air” or the evil effects of drafts.  The “medicines” included such minerals as iron ore and sulphur; such vegetables as dried seeds, roots, and the leaves of plants domesticated hundreds of years ago by the Incas or gathered in the tropical jungles of the lower Urubamba Valley; and such animals as starfish brought from the Pacific Ocean.  Some of them were really useful herbs, while others have only a psychopathic effect on the patient.  Each medicine was in an attractive little particolored woolen bag.  The bags, differing in design and color, woven on miniature hand looms, were arranged side by side on the ground, the upper parts turned over and rolled down so as to disclose the contents.

Not many miles below Sicuani, at a place called Racche, are the remarkable ruins of the so-called Temple of Viracocha, described by Squier.  At first sight Racche looks as though there were here a row of nine or ten lofty adobe piers, forty or fifty feet high!  Closer inspection, however, shows them all to be parts of the central wall of a great temple.  The wall is pierced with large doors and the spaces between the doors are broken by niches, narrower at the top than at the bottom.  There are small holes in the doorposts for bar-holds.  The base of the great wall is about five feet thick and is of stone.  The ashlars are beautifully cut and, while not rectangular, are roughly squared and fitted together with most exquisite care, so as to insure their making a very firm foundation.  Their surface is most attractive, but, strange to say, there is unmistakable evidence that the builders did not wish the stonework to show.  This surface was at one time plastered with clay, a very significant fact.  The builders wanted the wall to seem to be built entirely of adobe, yet, had the great clay wall rested on the ground, floods and erosion might have succeeded in undermining it.  Instead, it rests securely on a beautifully built foundation of solid masonry.  Even so, the great wall does not stand absolutely true, but leans slightly to the westward.  The wall also seems to be less weathered on the west side.  Probably the prevailing or strongest wind is from the east.

An interesting feature of the ruins is a round column about twenty feet high—­a very rare occurrence in Inca architecture.  It also is of adobe, on a stone foundation.  There is only one column now standing.  In Squier’s day the remains of others were to be seen, but I could find no evidences of them.  There was probably a double row of these columns to support the stringers and tiebeams of the roof.  Apparently one end of a tiebeam rested on the circular column and the other end was embedded in the main wall.  The holes where the tiebeams entered the wall have stone lintels.