We went on again over the high, brown, barren world, the wind-swept summit of each succeeding land-wave bringing again above the horizon the great snow-crested wall that each time seemed near, yet all the jogging day appeared not a yard nearer. At three we came suddenly to a vast split in the earth, into which we began to go down and ever down by acute zigzags and stony cuestas that grew so steep we had to dismount and lead our animals. Before and below us spread the magnificent cañon of the Urubamba, that river of many names which, rising near Titicaca, at length adds its bit to the giant Amazon. Spring plowing was in progress on the valley floor, walled by mountains as far as the eye could reach in either direction. Over this rampart the sun still peered when we reached the level of the river at last and, picking up the road from up the valley, jogged down along it.
Stone-faced terraces of the Incas were frequent; here and there far up the sheer enclosing bluffs were the ruins of pre-Conquest watch-towers of rough stone. At times the road was itself one of these ancient terraces, the retaining wall of the one above rubbing our left elbows, a sheer drop of some eight feet to that below close on our right. In places the river itself was faced and narrowed by massive cut-stones. The exotic iron bridge, replacing to-day the former one of braided withes, by which we crossed to Ollantaytambo had a central pier of those enormous boulders which the bygone race seemed to toss about at will.
We rode to the bare, mud-hutted plaza past splendid wrought-stone walls of what had once been palaces little inferior to those of Cuzco. The local “authority” bowed low over our “passport” and turned the gobernación over to us for the night. This was an all but windowless second-story room opening on the unfurnished plaza, with a springy earth floor laid on poles. Into it shrinking alguaciles lugged our baggage and a rheumatic table and bench, without once releasing their staffs of office. Tomás, our soldier-servant, had found the bringing up of the rear a heavy task, and he and his worn and sorrowful black mule arrived with the last rays of the setting sun. Meanwhile, the egg supply of Ollantaytambo having been greatly reduced, we spread our saddle-blankets and lay down with heads to the walls; for the slope of the floor was such that to stretch along them would have been to fetch up before morning in a tangled confusion in the middle of the room.
Like Limatambo, near which Chusquito had ended our joint career, Ollantaytambo was one of the four fortresses and rest-houses, each about twelve leagues out on the Inca highways that sallied forth from Cuzco to the “Four Corners of the Earth.” Its ruins, among the most striking in South America, consist of fairly recent Inca structures alternating with remains of unknown antiquity. Unquestioned history, however, has little to say of the great wrought-stone fortress in the best “Inca style” on the hill overlooking the town; the several splendid defensive walls, on the general plan of Sacsahuaman, being topped off with any chips of stone at hand, as if at the sudden appearance of besiegers. This might suggest that a later race of less energy had taken advantage of the works of more hardy ancestors, but for the mystery of the “Tired Stones” of porphyry, the largest 25 by 10 by 5 feet in dimensions, which lie abandoned all the way from the town to the quarry far up near the top of the mountain wall across the river, down the face of which they were tobogganed.
Ollantaytambo unquestionably was once densely populated. On all sides it is surrounded by remarkable terraces, some still under half-hearted cultivation, long and flat, with barely a foot difference in each succeeding level, on the valley floor; narrow and high-walled on the swift mountainsides and for miles up a side gully to the east. The inhabitants of to-day, unemotional, bath-fearing, Quichua-speaking Indians, as in all this region, still occupy much of the old “Inca” town, with its shoulder-wide streets between massive stone walls that grow more and more careless in construction in direct ratio to their distance from the center. Whole blocks of these ancient houses are still intact, except for the roofs, a single doorway giving entrance to each block. Strangely enough, this was the same unbroken exterior wall around an interior court common to the Moor and Spaniard. Had it fallen to men of the Anglo-Saxon race to overthrow the empire of the Incas, they would have been vastly more struck by the aboriginal architecture than were the Conquistadores.
Enormous cut-stones are here and there incorporated with the buildings of to-day; as in Cuzco, many an adobe second-story has been superimposed on the walls of what must have been at least a king’s palace. Far up the sheer bluff behind the ancient town hangs the “school,” bright yellow in color, constructed, according to the alcalde, of some concrete-like substance that has not disintegrated under the rain and sunshine of centuries. From below it looks more like a five-story building than the five terraces piled one above the other on the inaccessible face of the mountain, which it really is. If, as is commonly accepted, it was a school for children of the nobles—for the Incas, like the priests who have inherited their power, did not believe in education for the common people—a daily climb to and descent from it eliminated any necessity for a course in physical training. Whether the “school” was built by another race, or whether those whose massive monuments cover the site below could not carry their blocks of stone so far aloft, is but another of those baffling mysteries that hover forever over the ruins of the Andes. About the town are several “baths” of carved stone, which may rather have been reservoirs for drinking water—I for one will not believe that a bath was ever a part of the equipment of the Andean Indian. As everywhere within a radius of many miles about Cuzco, every possible boulder, ground-stone, or rock-ledge is carved into seats, steps, dungeon-like grottoes, every fantastic shape a tyrannic mind could have conceived, a score of grotesque forms that can only be accounted for as the whims of some despot. The ancient Peruvian emperors seem to have believed, as firmly as the windjammer’s “bo’s’n” who sets his crew to picking oakum, in the relationship between idle hands and mischief, and to have assigned the otherwise unengaged the task of carving the nearest boulder.
With the remaining half of the seventy-five miles from Cuzco to Mandorpampa before us, we were away betimes in the soft, early-summer morning, tinged with coolness from off the half-hidden snow-clads above, as we rode northeastward into the sunrise down the right bank of the Urubamba. Gradually, as the morning warmed, the blue-white glaciers of Piri and its neighbors shook off their night wraps of clouds, until they stood forth above us in all their massive grandeur. The valley narrowed to a cañon, and that to a gorge, with repulsive, bare mountain walls standing precipitously more than a thousand feet into the sky on either hand. Here and there the rock-broiling river was hurried between retaining walls laboriously constructed by the bygone race. Often these alone held us up, as the precipice shouldered us to the sheer edge of the stream; sometimes, indeed, the road was hewn out of the perpendicular mountainside and carried tremulously across from one solid foothold to another on patched-up props of stone. Straight above us on virtually unassailable crags were the ruins of walls, and perhaps small forts, the holders of which might have showered down boulders squarely upon us—had they not centuries since been laid away in their bottle-shaped graves, hugging their osseous knees. On the inaccessible left bank were scores of ancient terraces. For miles every available inch of the mountainside had once been prepared for cultivation. Small, indeed, must have been the laborer’s wage, a daily handful of beans and corn, in this once densely populated cañon, where the struggle for existence forced the construction of an eight-foot wall of stone to uphold a four-foot shelf of cultivation.
Spring plowing in the Urubamba Valley. The woman in front is scattering manure, the man behind dropping seed potatoes and covering them by a flip of the bare foot
Hourly it grew more perfect summer, and ever more delightful views and magnificent vistas broke unexpectedly upon us, contrasting strangely with the bleak, wind-swept puna of the day before. The old trail from Cuzco to the tropical montaña climbed sulkily away up a side quebrada toward the dreary uplands. This new road to Santa Ana had only recently made accessible for the first time in modern days this marvelous cañon of the Urubamba. It was nowhere steep. We went down by frequent little stony descents, with no corresponding rises, half-aware of now and then standing in our stirrups as our animals dropped from under us, the conscious self gazing at the enthralling scene below and above. Frequent pack-trains passed us, bound upward out of the hot-lands with cargoes of fiery native aguardiente, in leather skins inside cloth-wrapped wooden frames, or long cylindrical packages of coca-leaves such as the drivers were chewing. Often the meetings were at points where only extreme vigilance saved us from being pushed over the precipice; for, though our right of way gave us the mountainside, the pack-animals, shy of the roaring stream below, sought to crowd in between us and the wall, in spite of the threatening cries and whistling of their arrieros.