The virgin of the sun

by George Chetwynd Griffith

Juan Pizarro’s first plan of attack had been greatly altered in after debate. In the first place the assault was to be made under cover of darkness, as the Peruvians, like all Indian nations, never fought at night unless forced to do so. Secondly, Don Hernando was to take command of the troop which was to carry out the flanking operations, while Gonzalo Pizarro, with Pedro de Candia as Captain of the Artillery, was to hold the square and what was left of the city.

The morning was busily employed in constructing scaling-ladders and mantlets, to protect the assailants from the stones that would be showered upon them, and shortly after the midday meal Juan Pizarro, at the head of forty horse, rode out of the city to the southward. This move was a feint to persuade the Peruvian leaders that he had gone on a foraging raid to replenish the exhausted store-houses of Cuzco.

But as soon as the sudden darkness had fallen over the valley he turned aside and threaded his way up through the side valleys on to the open plain which was commanded by the curved northern and eastern face of the great fortress. Meanwhile another party on foot had left the city carrying the ladders and mantlets, and made their way up under cover of the darkness to the gorge of the Rodadero past the south-eastern flank of the fortress and met him on the plain. By this time, too, Don Hernando had taken his troop round by the north up the steep, paved roads towards the head of the pass from which de Soto and his companions had first seen the City of the Sun.

The Sacsahuaman, the guardian fortress of the metropolis of the Land of the Four Regions, was at this time by far the most splendid and stately monument of architectural skill in the Western Hemisphere, and would have lost little by comparison with some of the strongest places of the Old World. It was, indeed, rather a fortified hill than a fortress—a Gibraltar of the land.

On the side facing the city it towered up an almost sheer ascent of more than seven hundred feet, faced with massive masonry, and approachable only by narrow zigzag paths and flights of steps hewn in the living rock, and absolutely unapproachable by a hostile force so long as the summit or fortress proper was held even by a scanty garrison. The approaches to the hill at either end were ravines dominated by high walls built of stones so huge and solidly set together that they stand to-day as firm as the primæval rock on which they are founded. To the northward the true fighting face, commanding the little, level plain of the Rodadero, consists of three angled walls of cyclopean stonework, extending in the shape of a bent bow and rising in terraces one above the other to a height of some seventy feet, and the lower of these walls forms a curve of some eighteen hundred feet in length.

At the time of the Conquest this colossal structure was crowned by three towers, the central and greatest of which was the true citadel, half palace, half fortress, built close to the perpendicular wall overlooking the city, and rising some sixty feet above its summit. These three towers have vanished, and much of the outworks are damaged now, torn down by the Conquerors to yield dressed stones for the building of the modern city, but, even after the ravages of three centuries, the Sacsahuaman remains to-day the greatest as well as the most marvellous structure of the New World.

Such, then, was the strong place which the remnant of the Spanish army in Cuzco, something less than a hundred men in all, set out to storm on that memorable night. If it had been held by disciplined troops, furnished with even the most primitive artillery of the times, it would have been impregnable, but its present defenders possessed only the arms of savage warfare—bows and arrows, darts and stones, and for closer quarters axes, maces and swords of copper, while its assailants, few as they were, were equipped with the most efficient arms that the art of war had so far produced.

Had it not been for the fatal decision of the night before the whole country would still have been occupied by the countless throngs, through which it would have been impossible for the attacking forces to have passed without discovery, as they now did, until they had reached the points at which the assault was to be delivered. Instead of this they must have been entangled and overwhelmed in the difficult defiles which, by an oversight of which no European commander could have been guilty, they now found unguarded.

The point which Juan Pizarro had selected for his attack was a great gateway opening on to the narrow valley through which the little stream now known as the Rodadero flows down to the ravine. This was called the Tiapunco, or Gate of Sand, possibly from the sandy nature of the little plain. It was an opening in the lower and outer wall of the fortifications, and led on to the first terrace of level ground between the outer and middle wall.

When they reached it they found it blocked by masses of stone which made almost as solid a barrier as the wall itself, and guarded by vigilant sentries, who instantly gave the alarm by kindling a huge pile of grass and brushwood saturated with oil and fat which had been built up in an angle beside the gate. The moment that the flames leapt up they were answered by others all along the triple walls and on the battlements of the central towers.