was a stout ball of red wool. Everyone took hold of
it, the men on one side, the women on the other, performing the sacred
dance called yaquayra. When they came to the square ... they went round
and round until they were in the shape of a spiral shell. Then they
dropped the cable on the ground and left it coiled up like a snake. The
people returned to their places and those who had charge of the cable took
it back to its house." An extremely important instance of the application
of the spiral is preserved in an illustration in the Account of the
Antiquities of Peru by the native chronicler Salcamayhua (ed. Hakluyt, p.
109). He relates that the Inca Huayna-Capac, when he reached the town of
Tumipampa, "ordered water to be brought from a river by boring through a
mountain, and making the channel enter the city by curves in this way:"

[Illustration.]

Figure 46.

The illustration, reproduced here (fig. 46), exhibits an extremely
ingenious mode of irrigation which divided the country surrounding the
town into nine zones of land lying between currents of water. These are
cut through by an exit canal which, at the same time, presumably supplied
a direct water-way for traffic to and from the town. The association of
the spiral form with irrigation would not, perhaps, seem as important and
significant did we not know that the ancient Peruvians, as proven by
Wiener, habitually laid out the irrigation canals in their maize-fields so
as to form regular designs, some of which resembled those illustrated on
fig. 40, nos. 2, 4, 6, 7, which have been shown to signify the union of
the Above and Below, or Heaven and Earth. In the Peruvian irrigation
canals the water supplied the light lines and the earth the dark, and when
the small canals were full and were observed in certain lights, they must
have resembled light blue or white patterns running through the dark
earth. That their inventors and makers actually associated them with
profound meaning and laid them from superstitious as well as practical
motives is obvious; for, in Peru, as in Mexico, we find the periodical
union of the Heaven and Earth, of rain and earth celebrated with
ceremonial drinking of chicha, specially brewed for this period which
seems to have been the regularly appointed time for juvenile match-making,
by order of the Inca.

"When the Inca gave women as wives they were received because it was the