Maya Banks Highland Ever After !NEW!

Maya Banks is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author of the Breathless trilogy and more than sixty novels across many genres, including erotic, contemporary, historical and paranormal, all with a happily ever after.

Pre-Columbian culture of the Northern Andean region that flourished between c. 800 bc and c. ad 1630. It is named after the small town of San Agustn in the department of Huila, southern Colombia. It is classed archaeologically as a culture of the Intermediate area (see Pre-Columbian South America: Greater Central America). The region where San Agustn culture developed covers several hundred square kilometres and contains approximately 40 Pre-Columbian archaeological sites, each with its own history. The more important of these include Alto de Lavapatas, Alto de Lavaderos, Alto de los Idolos, Las Mesitas, Isnos, El Vegn, and Quinchana. The entire landscape shows evidence of human habitation: ancient trackways and field systems, house terraces, carved boulders, cist graves, shaft tombs, and a series of mounds covering stone-built chambers containing carved statues. These monuments were first described by Juan de Santa Gertrudis in 1758 and have been studied sporadically ever since....

Maya Banks Highland Ever After

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Whoever read as a boy the books of old travellersin the Andes, such as Humboldt's Aspects of Nature,or pored over such accounts of the primitive Americanpeoples as are given in Prescott's Conquest of Peru musthave longed to visit some day the countries that firedhis imagination. These had been my experiences, andto them there was subsequently added a curiosity tolearn the causes which produced so many revolutionsand civil wars in Spanish America, and, still later, asense that these countries, some of them issuing froma long period of turbulence, were becoming potenteconomic factors in the modern world. So when aftermany years the opportunity of having four clearmonths for a journey to South America presenteditself, I spent those months in seeing as much as Icould within the time, and was able to make someobservations and form certain impressions regardingthe seven republics I visited. These observations andimpressions are contained in the following pages. Theyare, of course, merely first impressions, but the impressionswhich travel makes on a fresh mind have theirvalue if they are tested by subsequent study and bybeing submitted to persons who know the countrythoroughly. I have tried so to test these impressionsof mine, and hope they may be of service to those whodesire to learn something about South America, butxviiihave not time to peruse the many books of travel thathave been written about each of its countries.

The duty of a traveller, or a historian, or a philosopheris, of course, to reach and convey the exact truth,and any tendency either to lighten or to darkenthe picture is equally to be condemned. But wherethere is room for doubt, and wherever that whichmay be called the "temperamental equation" of theobserver comes in, an optimistic attitude would seemto be the safer, that is to say, likely to be nearerto the truth. We are all prone to see faults ratherthan merits, and in making this remark I do notforget the so-called "log-rolling critics," because withthem the question is of what the critic says, not of whathe sees, which may be something quite different. Ifthis maxim holds true, it is especially needed when atraveller is judging a foreign country, for the bias alwayspresent in us which favours our own national ways andtraits makes us judge the faults of other nations moreseverely than we do those with which we are familiar.As this unconscious factor often tends to darken thexxiiipicture that a traveller draws, it is safer for him, if indoubt, to throw in a little light so as to secure a justresult. Moreover, we are disposed, when we deal withanother country, to be unduly impressed by the defectswe actually see and to forget to ask what is, after all, thereally important question, whether things are gettingbetter or worse. Is it an ebbing or a flowing tide thatwe see? Even in reflecting on the past of our owncountry, which we know better than we do that of othercountries, we are apt, in noting the emergence of newdangers, to forget how many old dangers have disappeared.Much more is this kind of error likely toaffect us in the case of a country whose faults repel usmore than do our own national faults, and whose recuperativeforces we may overlook or undervalue.

A still more remarkable contrast, however, betweenthese two necks of land lies in the part they have respectivelyplayed in human affairs. The Isthmus of Panamamust, in far-off prehistoric days, have been the highwayalong which those wandering tribes whose forefathershad passed in their canoes from northeastern Asiaalong the Aleutian Isles into Alaska found their way,after many centuries, into the vast spaces of SouthAmerica. But its place in the annals of mankindduring the four centuries that have elapsed since4Balboa gazed from a mountain top rising out of theforest upon the far-off waters of the South Sea has beensmall, indeed, compared to that which the Isthmusof Suez has held from the beginning of history. Itechoed to the tread of the armies of Thothmes andRameses marching forth on their invasions of westernAsia. Along the edge of it Israel fled forth before thehosts of Pharaoh. First the Assyrian and afterwardsthe Persian hosts poured across it to conquer Egypt;and over its sands Bonaparte led his regiments toPalestine in that bold adventure which was stopped atSt. Jean d'Acre. It has been one of the great highwaysfor armies for forty centuries, as the canal cut throughit is now one of the great highways of commerce.

Thirty years after Morgan's raid the commercialpossibilities of the Isthmus fascinated a Scotsman whohad more than the usual fervour and less than theusual caution of his nation. William Paterson, thefounder of the Bank of England, led a colony, chieflycomposed of Scottish people, and well supplied withScottish ministers, to a place near Acla in the Gulf ofDarien, on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, one hundredmiles southeast of Colon, meaning to make it a greatcentre of trade over both oceans. They went out,however, imperfectly equipped and ignorant of climaticconditions. Many perished from disease; KingWilliam III gave them no support; the Spaniards atlast attacked and compelled the surrender of the few whoremained. Thereafter nobody disturbed the subjects ofthe Catholic king. New Panama, planted in a bettersite where the roadstead is a little deeper, although tooshallow for the ocean liners of our own day, continued toenjoy a certain prosperity as the gateway to all westernSouth America, for there was and could be no landtransit through the trackless forests and rugged mountainsthat lie along the coast between the Isthmus andthe Equator. But the decline and decay of the colonialempire of Spain under the most ill-conceived and ill-administeredscheme of government that selfishness andstupidity ever combined to devise, steadily reduced theimportance of the city. Nothing was done to develop17the country, which remained, outside Panama and afew other ports, an unprofitable solitude. Neither didthe extinction of the rule of Spain, which came quietlyhere because the local governor did not resist it,make any difference. Occupied with domestic broils,the new republic, first called New Granada and nowColombia, had not the capital nor the intelligence northe energy to improve the country or develop the commercialpossibilities of the Isthmus. This was a taskreserved for children of the race which had producedDrake and Morgan.

But its cool and cloudy climate is only one of thesingular features of the coast. From the Isthmus tillone gets a little way south of the Equator at the Gulf39of Guayaquil, the usual wet summer season of thetropics prevails and the abundant rains give to thehighlands along the coast of Colombia and Ecuadorsplendid forests, which will one day be a source ofwealth to those countries. But at this point, or to bemore precise, about the boundary of Ecuador and Peru,near the town of Tumbez where Pizarro landed, theclimatic conditions suddenly change, and there beginsa rainless tract which extends down the coast as far asCoquimbo in 30 S. latitude. The vaporous moisturewhich the southeasterly trade winds bring up fromthe other side of the continent is most of it spent inshowers falling on the eastern side of the Andes, andwhat remains is absorbed by the air of the dry plateauxbetween the parallel chains of that range, so that hardlyany passes over to the western side of the mountains.The Antarctic current, cooling the air of the warmerregions it enters, creates plenty of mists but no rain,the land being warmer than the sea. Thus so muchof the coast of western South America as lies betweenthe ocean and the Cordillera of the Andes fromTumbez nearly to Valparaiso, for a distance of sometwo thousand miles, is dry and sterile. This strip ofland varies in width from forty to sixty miles. It iscrossed here and there by small rivers fed by the snowsof the Andes behind, and along their banks areoases of verdure. Otherwise the whole coast ofthe strip is a bare, brown, and dismally barrendesert.

We had hoped before reaching the arid region to40touch at the city of Guayaquil, which is the chief portand only place of commercial importance in the mountainrepublic of Ecuador. It had, however, been putunder quarantine by Peru, owing to the appearancein it of yellow fever and the Oriental plague, so we hadto pass on without landing, as quarantine would havemeant a loss of eight or ten days out of our limitedtime. Ecuador is not the most progressive of the SouthAmerican countries, and Guayaquil enjoys the reputationof being the pest-house of the continent, rivallingfor the prevalence and malignity of its malarial feverssuch dens of disease as Fontesvilla on the Pungwe Riverin South Africa and the Guinea coast itself, and addingto these the more swift and deadly yellow fever, whichhas now been practically extirpated from every otherpart of South America except the banks of the Amazon.The city stands in a naturally unhealthy situationamong swamps at the mouth of a river, but sinceHavana and Colon and Vera Cruz and Rio de Janeiroand even Santos, once the deadliest of the Brazilianports, have all been purified and rendered safe, it seemsto be high time that efforts should be made to improveconditions at a place whose development is so essentialto the development of Ecuador itself. be457b7860