South America

In the Inca cities, Spanish conquerors smashed sacred images and symbols—destroying clues to a history already difficult to recover. What could the scattered ruins still tell us about the peoples who lived there before them?

Writing in the early twentieth century, W. H. Koebel looks beyond the familiar story of the Incas to a continent of mountain kingdoms, riverlands and forest tribes. In Peru, fragments of pottery, ancient dwellings and monumental ruins offer evidence, but conquest has left much of the past uncertain. The Incas themselves told of Manco Capac, a child of the Sun who came with his sister-wife from an island in Lake Titicaca to found their rule. Yet even the great Inca empire, Koebel suggests, inherited much from peoples who came before. Which traces are history—and which are legend?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.