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nd flushed, and sparkled in the rays of the sun, which gilded every pinnacle and turned each glacier into a river of gold, seeming to flow slowly downwards towards the vales and plains of the Andes, as yet flooded with the darkness of the night.
But soon the purple flood of darkness began to give place to golden light, as, still streaming down, as it were, from the mountain tops, the sunshine leaped in bright cataracts from point to point, rushing up this dark gully, that vast fissure, turning gloom into glowing landscape, and at last filling the vast vales with gladness and life, as the glowing picture burst into full beauty.
Here, at the foot of the mountains, flowed the mighty rivers of South America, bordered by the vast, eternal tropic forest, with its dank, steaming moisture--the home of the fierce beast, the loathsome reptile, and insect plagues innumerable. Far up the mountains was the land of ice and snow, fierce biting wind, and sleety tempest, with here and there patches of verdure, the pastoral land of the vicuna and llama flocks; but in the intermediate space, balanced, as it were, between the tropical heat and the wintry frosts, on the table-lands half-way up the mountains, was the stronghold of the Peruvian civilisation. So near to the equator that intolerable heat might have been expected, an expectation, though, not fulfilled, for the elevation gave to the Peruvians a glorious climate, with all the brightness but none of the enervation of equatorial land.
Cottage, house, and palace, of no mean construction, were scattered here and there, the homes of peasant and Peruvian noble. But it was upon the temple crowning a near elevation that the eye would rest, in rapt astonishment at its magnificence and grandeur. The description may sound like a scrap from some eastern fable, but none the less it is a fact culled from the pages of history.
For as that bright morning sun peered at length above the shoulder of an eastern hill, it was to shine full upon the Temple of the Sun a