To defend Cuzco from attack by enemies coming from the north, the Incas built a great fortress on a hill overlooking the city. To reach it, the easiest way is to take a mule and ride through Cuzco’s narrow streets, up the ravine to the ancient gateway in the east side of the hill. At first sight it might seem ridiculous not to walk, as the fortress in only 600 feet above the city. But Cuzco has an elevation of 11,500 feet, and hill-climbing at this altitude is best done on mule-back.

The Prefect kindly supplied us mules and an escort. On our way we passed the church of Los Nazarenes whose superstructure is laid on ancient walls that are noteworthy because of the many serpents that are carved in relief on the stones. Among the crude pottery dishes that I bought in the streets of La Paz was one decorated with these same little wriggling serpents.

Beyond Los Nazarenes the street narrowed until presently it became simply a path in a rocky gorge. As we entered the gorge there was at first little to be seen. Then in its narrowest and most easily defended part we came suddenly upon a pile of massive rocks, roughly hewn. Huge blocks of stone, five or six feet high, slightly rounded off and accurately fitted together, are here built into a gateway twelve feet high that opens into a passage defended by a wall of large boulders. This leads to the hilltop. On the side toward the city, the slope is nearly precipitous, but the approach was made even more difficult near the summit by a series of three terraces each twelve or fourteen feet high. There is nothing remarkable about the summit except the beautiful view of Cuzco which one gets from here.

The immediate front of the hill just below the upper terraces is extremely steep. About half-way down to the city the spur broadens and flattens out. It was there the first Inca built his palace. On the lower continuation of this spur, between two rivulets, the palaces and temples of the later Incas were built.

It is the north side of Sacsahuaman, the side away from Cuzco, that is the chief object of interest. Here the slope is very gentle and it was necessary to fortify the place artificially. Furthermore, it was on this side that attacks might be expected, not only from the savages of the Amazonian wilds, but also from the hostile tribes of the Andean plateau, including the Caras of Ecuador. Accordingly, here the Incas exerted their utmost skill in the construction of a powerful line of defence.

The fortifications extend for a third of a mile entirely across the back of the hill, and are flanked by steep valleys at each end. They consist of three lines of zigzag terraces, one above another, each faced with walls of colossal boulders, some of them twelve feet in diameter. The lower terrace has an average height of about twenty-five feet; the middle and upper ones are some six feet less. There are few sights in the world more impressive than these Cyclopean walls.

The Incas were accustomed to build great terraces and I have seen them in many places in Peru. In every other case, however, the terrace walls are straight, or nearly so. Here, although the walls are parallel, they are also zigzag and consist for the entire length of salients and reËntrant angles. The apex of each salient in the lower wall is usually formed by a conspicuously large block, twenty-five feet high and ten or twelve feet thick.

The size and strength of the walls and the employment of salients which enabled the defenders to cover the entire face of the fortification with a flanking fire, a device unknown even to the European Crusaders, made the Inca fortress practically impregnable. It was certainly quite secure from the assaults of any Indian assailants, armed only with such primitive weapons as bows and arrows, slings and spears.

Next to the colossal size of the stones which the builders used for the lower wall, the most impressive thing is the care they took to fit the stones together without cement, so that they should stand for ages.

It is said that most of the smaller stones have been carried off for building purposes in the city. Be this as it may, what remains is the most impressive spectacle of man’s handiwork that I have ever seen in America. Photographs absolutely fail to

do it justice, for at best they show only a few boulders, a small part of one of the walls. If taken far enough away to show the whole fort, the eye loses all sense of the great size of the stone units owing to the fact that they are so much larger than any stones to which it is accustomed.

The Inca author, Garcilasso de la Vega, wrote, in the sixteenth century, as follows of Sacsahuaman: “This was the greatest and most superb of the edifices that the Incas raised to demonstrate their majesty and power. Its greatness is incredible to those who have not seen it.... It passes the power of imagination to conceive how so many and so great stones could be so accurately fitted together as scarcely to admit the insertion of the point of a knife between them. And all of this is the more wonderful as they had no squares or levels to place on the stones and ascertain if they would fit together. How often must they have taken up and put down the stones to ascertain if the joints were perfect! Nor had they cranes, or pulleys, or other machinery whatever.... But what is most marvellous of the edifice is the incredible size of the stones, and the astonishing labor of bringing them together and placing them.” Compare this with what a recent writer on the Caroline Islands says, in describing the colossal stone ruins on the Island of Lele near Kusaie: “Looking at their solid outlines, seamed and furrowed with the rain and sun of untold generations, one cannot help marvelling at the ingenuity and skill of these primitive engineers, in moving, lifting, and poising such huge and unwieldy masses of rock into their present position, where these mighty structures, shadowed by great forest trees, stand defying Time’s changing seasons and the fury of tropic elements.”

Also this from Captain Cook’s “Voyages”: “The platforms are faced with hewn stones of a very large size. They used no sort of cement, yet the joints are exceedingly close and the stones mortised and tenoned one into another in a very artful manner and the side walls were not perpendicular but sloping a little inwards.” This is an accurate description of Sacsahuaman. Yet Captain Cook never came to the highlands of Peru and probably never even saw a picture of these walls. In this paragraph he is describing the stone ruins on Easter Island.[3]

The resemblances between the ruins of upper Peru and those of Easter Island and the Caroline Islands offer a remarkably interesting field for ethnological speculation. Unfortunately as yet they have told us but little of the builders of Sacsahuaman.

It is generally conceded that the fortress was commenced in the reign of the Inca Viracocha, two hundred years before the Spanish Conquest. Whether this tradition is well founded, it is difficult to say. It may be due to the fact that the name “Viracocha,” as Sir Clements Markham points out, was simply the term applied to a powerful character, a term of admiration, equivalent to the word “gentleman” in English.

Whoever built it, the task was certainly heroic. Many of the stones were undoubtedly quarried near by. As for methods of transportation, we know that the Incas understood the manufacture of strong cables, for they built suspension bridges across many of the chasms of central Peru. By the aid of these cables and of wooden rollers, it would have been entirely possible to have dragged very large stones for a considerable distance, up inclined planes. Although they had no draft animals, llamas being only accustomed to carrying, they had thousands of patient Quichuas at their disposal, whose combined efforts, extended over long lines of cables, would have been amply sufficient to move even the largest of these great blocks. Nevertheless, when one considers the difficulty of fitting together two irregular boulders, both of them weighing eight or ten tons, one’s admiration for the skill of these old builders knows no bounds.

The modern Peruvians are very fond of speculating as to the method which the Incas employed to make their stones fit so perfectly. One of the favorite stories is that the Incas knew of a plant whose juices rendered the surface of a block so soft that the marvellous fitting was accomplished by rubbing the stones together for a few moments with this magical plant juice!

Discussion and speculation will undoubtedly continue indefinitely, yet one can come to at least two conclusions: the Incas had an unlimited amount of labor at their disposal, and time was no object.

Furthermore, they were apparently very fond of playing the game of stone-cutting. From the fortress we rode across the little grassy plain that separates the terraces from the rocks of Rodadero hill. On its summit, terraces have been hewn out of the solid rock, and it is said that the Incas were fond of sitting here to watch their patient workmen engaged in putting together the magnificent walls of Sacsahuaman. On the north side of the hill, the rock has been worn into grooves by the water and polished by the ponchos of generations of pleasure-seekers who have used this curious formation as a “toboggan slide.” Our guides assured us that the habit of coasting down this hill on ponchos was started by the Incas. At all events, it is still a favorite Sunday amusement.

In the rolling country north of the Rodadero are numbers of rocks and ledges that have been carved into fantastic seats, nooks, and crannies by a people who seem to have taken a keen delight in stone-carving for its own sake. It is difficult to explain in any other way the maze of niches and shelves, seats and pedestals that are scattered about on every hand. Writers are accustomed to label as “Inca thrones” every stone seat they find in the mountains of Peru. But here the ledges are carved so irregularly as almost to bewilder the imagination.

A mile away to the northeast we discovered the dim outlines of a large amphitheatre where the Incas may have gathered on the grassy slopes to

watch games and religious festivals. It offers an attractive field for digging, as it seems to have been entirely overlooked hitherto.

On our way back to the city we were invited to rest at Sr. Lomellini’s country house which is built in the gardens of Manco Capac, the first Inca. The entrance is through a gate in the wall of the ancient outer terrace. Near the house stands a section of the palace wall, thirty feet long and ten feet high, containing a recessed door and window. In the outer terrace the stones are of irregular shapes while in this wall they are practically rectangular. In his house, Sr. Lomellini has collected a number of extremely interesting specimens of the ceramic art of the Incas. The most striking are two very large vases resembling in shape and marking the small one figured here. This is only six inches high; those are nearly three feet. There are quite a number of imperfect specimens in the American Museum of Natural History.

After the gardener had given us a handful of roses, we left the precincts of the ancient Inca and clattered down the hill over the rough cobblestones to the picturesque sights—and distressing smells—of modern Cuzco.