patience of expert stone-cutters, assured us that this was verily the Cuzco of Pizarro, Garcilasso de la Vega, and the Spanish chroniclers. The one distinctive feature that separates Cuzco from all other cities in America is the prevalence of these long, dark, sombre walls. When you look at a building from a distance, it seems to be an ordinary two-story Spanish house with a red-tiled roof, wooden balconies, and white-washed adobe walls. As you come a little closer, it strikes you that the whitewash has been worn off the lower part of the walls, but when you come closer still, you find that this portion consists of unpainted Inca stone-work, still fresh and attractive.
The most striking wall in Cuzco is that of the palace said to have belonged to the Inca Rocca, which is composed of very large irregular boulders. They are of all sizes and shapes, some with as many as a dozen angles, but all fitting perfectly. The stones used in most of the ancient palaces and temples are more nearly rectangular. The corner-stones of buildings are frequently rounded off, but there are almost no circular walls in Cuzco. The principal exception to this is in the Dominican Monastery, once the temple of the Sun, where the end of one of the buildings is rounded like the chancel of a church. This is, perhaps, the finest bit of stone-cutting in Cuzco, and is shown off by the Dominican Fathers with great zest. E. G. Squier, who lived for some time in the convent and made a minute examination of these walls, found that the sides of contact of each stone are true radii of a double circle, and that the line of general inclination of the wall is perfect in every block.
In some of the walls, the outer surfaces of the stones are perfectly flat, but in general, they are slightly convex. The blocks vary in length from a few inches to several feet, although it is very rare to find any more than five feet long. All are laid with remarkable precision and at first sight appear to be absolutely rectangular. On closer examination, you find that there is scarcely an absolute right angle in the whole wall. Each block is slightly irregular, but this irregularity matches so exactly with that of the next that there is no space for a needle to enter. The result of such careful workmanship, combined with the use of dark-colored stone, is to produce a dignity and solidity that is very impressive.
The characteristics of Inca architecture are in part the same as those of the older Egyptian ruins: individual blocks of great size; doors narrower at the top than at the bottom, and walls with a base markedly wider than the apex so that the sloping front is a distinct feature. Probably the same methods which the Egyptians evolved in order to put in position large monoliths too heavy to be lifted by hand, were employed by the Incas. They seem to have thought nothing of fitting carefully into place, on top of a wall fifteen feet high, boulders weighing several tons.
The followers of Pizarro who divided Cuzco among themselves, built their homes on the massive walls of the Inca palaces. Sometimes they left the Inca wall standing to a height of six or seven feet. In other instances it still rises to fifteen or twenty feet.
It is unfortunate that the Incas did not use cement. In that case the Spaniards would have found it much more difficult to have destroyed the ancient palaces, and more would have been left for the delectation of students and travellers to-day. Under the circumstances, it was a simple matter for the faithful disciples of the church to raise temples and towers of great beauty by the simple process of tearing down Inca palaces and using the material according to the ideas of ecclesiastical architecture which they had brought with them from Spain.