They often fight, not with bows and arrows, but with huge blow-pipes—as long as a man—using clay balls or little darts which have been dipped in poison. With these blow-pipes they can kill men and animals. These savage Indians catch fish for food, not with a line or net, but by putting poison in the streams where the fish are. The poison kills the fish and they float on the top, but it doesn’t spoil them for eating. The Indians of Ecuador are the most savage Indians now known, but in the country just south of Ecuador, in the country called Peru, once lived the most civilized Indians ever known. They lived not in tents or wigwams or huts, but in palaces, and they were very intelligent and very rich. They were called Incas and their capital was named Cuzco. The Incas had great treasures of gold and silver, and when the Spaniards first came to South America looking for gold or silver they found it in Cuzco already mined. All they had to do was to take it away from the Incas. This was easy because the Spaniards had guns, and the Incas, who had no such thing, were no match for them in a fight. So the Spaniards won and simply helped themselves to the gold, and made the Incas work in the mines for more. However, the joke was on the Spaniards, for many of their ships sailing back to Spain with their stolen treasure were captured by the pirates.

Many of the Spaniards who stayed in Peru married Indian women, so now most of the people in Peru are a mixture of Spanish and Indian.

There is little left of Cuzco, except ruins of the old Inca palaces. The present capital of Peru is Lima, but Lima beans don’t come from there. A medicine that is often given for fever does come from Peru, however. The Indians found that the bark of a certain tree when stewed in water made a kind of tea that was good for fever. When the white man came, he found it was good for fever too. So now the bark of this tree is gathered and sent to other countries to be used in making medicine to cure fevers. The medicine is called quinine.

In the United States loads are usually carried on freight trains or trucks but in the Andes Mountains they are usually carried on the backs of a little animal called a llama. A llama is something like a small camel without a hump.