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.