Word: peruvian
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...Peruvian Andes, not far from Lima, lies a haunted valley. To be caught there after dark, natives say, means almost certain death. If late afternoon finds a muleteer in the valley, he gets panicky and whips his beasts to escape lefore sunset. Workers on the Central Railway, which winds between the valley's forbidding mountain walls, insist on being taken home each night. Travelers through the valley dread to ride the railroad in the rainy season, for fear a landslide may maroon their train...
Scientists first heard of verruga in 1870, during the building of the Central Railway, when 7,000 workers died before the rails had been pushed out of the valley. The first investigator of the disease was a medical student named Daniel A. Carrión, now a Peruvian national hero, who died after inoculating himself with serum from a patient's wart. Verruga is still something of a medical mystery. Nobody has ever found out how the sandfly acquires its parasite, where it lays its eggs, why it seems to have thrived only in one narrow area. Doctors have...
...finish a doctorate thesis in zoology. Like other scholars before him, he was struck by resemblances between the cultures of Polynesia and South America. Both regions have "stepped" pyramids, "megalithic" structures, elaborate feather-work. Both cultivate sweet potatoes and call them by names which closely resemble their ancient Peruvian name: kumara. The strange stone heads on Easter Island look a great deal like some sculpture in Peru...
There is fair historical evidence of at least one such voyage. According to Peruvian tradition, the Inca Tupac Yupanqui sailed a large fleet of balsas into the Pacific, about 1470 A.D. Gone nearly a year, he returned with news of two islands he had discovered...
Last week, the balsa was almost ready to sail. Named the Kon-Tiki after a Peruvian god, she is 40 ft. long, 18 ft. wide, built of buoyant balsa wood logs cut in the jungles of Ecuador. There is no metal in her; all parts are lashed together with ropes, as the ancient Peruvians...