SACSAHUAMAN
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
[Illustration: A SECTION OF THE LOWER TERRACE, SACSAHUAMAN]
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
[Illustration: AN INCA VASE FROM CUZCO]
[Illustration: ARTICLES OF DRESS AND A DECORATED MULE HALTER FROM
CUZCO]
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.