of discarded mollusk shells, which protected the ridges from erosion for nearly 4700 years prior to the Spanish arrival, and produced a vast corrugated landscape that is visible from space. This incidental landscape protection came to a swift end, however, after diseases brought by Spanish colonists decimated the local population and after colonial officials resettled the survivors inland, without humans to create the protective covering, newly formed beach ridges simply eroded and vanished. According to Archaeologist Torben Rick, parts of the northern coast of Peru may look completely natural and pristine, “but if you rewind the clock a couple of millennia, you see that people were actively shaping this land by creating beach ridge systems". In fiction Marmontel's novel Les Incas, ou la destruction de l'empire du Perou (1777), inspired by Bartolomé de Las Casas's Account, tells a fictitious version of the conquest of Peru to portray the author's views on the religious fanaticism of the Conquistadors and their cruelty to the natives. An opera of Verdi, Alzira (1845), is set during the Conquest. In the play, an Inca called Zamoro wants to find the princess Alzira, who has been engaged to the Conquistador Gusmano. The second act of Rameau's Les Indes galantes (1735) is called Les incas du Pérou and tells the love story of a Spanish Conquistador and an Inca princess. The Spanish Comedy La aurora en Copacabana, written by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, dramatizes the Conquest under a religious perspective, adding allegorical characters that represents the Idolatry and the Christian conversion of the Native Peruvians. The first part of Madame de Graffigny's epistolary novel Lettres d'une Péruvienne narrates the abduction of Zilia, an Inca princess, by the Spaniards during the Conquest. Peter Shaffer's play The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) dramatizes the conquest of the Incas. In the play, Pizarro, Atahualpa, Valverde and other historical figures appear as characters. This event is also narrated as a Science Fiction novelette in Randall Garrett's Despoilers of the Golden Empire (1959). The Ransom Room it's the setting of the romance Das Gold von Caxamalca (1928) by the German novelist Jakob Wasserman. The conquest is also used as a starting point for the Matthew Reilly novel Temple, where the siege of Cusco is used. Many historical figures are mentioned, especially Pizarro who is mentioned as the pursuer of the protagonist. The Inca are featured in the third Campaign in