DESOLATION OF THE COUNTRY. 11 ever they could not destroy by the sword. The unoffending inhabitants who escaped death fled from their villages to distant parts of the country, and did not again return; leaving their dismantled abodes to record the downfall of the dominion of Spain, as their ancestors had been compelled to do, on occasion of their conquest, under similar calamities, three centuries before. The Spaniards have taken their leave of Peru, in repeating that tragedy of desolation which, as historians, tradition, and remains, assure us, was every where performed on their taking possession of it. Unrelenting slaughter and indiscriminate destruction marked the progress of Spanish conquest, and the ruins of towns and villages in the present day are mournful evidence that similar acts have signalized their defeat. The traveller, as he journeys along, may imagine, in combining the past with the present, that he is pursuing the track of an Attila, a Zingis, or a Tamerlane, who have been represented, like the deluge, the tornado, and the hurricane, to have involved every thing in one sweeping ruin. Before them, the land was as the garden of Eden; behind them, as the desolate wilderness." 66 It would be an endless task to record the va |