The cut represents the Mirador, or look-out, at Huanuco el Viejo. This structure measures about one hundred by one hundred and sixty feet at the base, and is about fifteen feet high, in a pyramidal form without terraces and furnished with a parapet wall enclosing the summit platform. The foundation is of rough stones, which form two steps projecting four or five feet, not clearly indicated in the cut. The walls or facings are of hewn blocks of limestone about four feet and a half long by a foot and a half thick. The blocks are very accurately cut and laid in cement. The interior is filled with gravel and clay, with a concavity in the centre popularly supposed to communicate by means of a subterranean gallery with the palace some half a mile distant. From a doorway in the parapet wall on the south an inclined plane—which seems often to have taken the place of a stairway in Peru—leads down to the ground. On the wall at each side of the entrance crouches an animal in stone, so much damaged that its kind cannot be determined.
Gateway at Huanuco.
Another noted ruin at Huanuco is that whose entrance is shown in the cut. The walls are of round stones irregularly laid in mortar, a kind of rubble called by the Peruvians pirca, but the gateway, shown in the cut, is built of hewn blocks three varas—as Rivero says, probably meaning feet—by one and a half. The lintel is one stone block eleven feet long, and the inclined posts are said to be of one piece, although the cut indicates that each is composed of four. The animals sculptured over the gateway at the sides are called monkeys by Rivero. Within the structure there are five similar gateways shown in the preceding cut and in the following ground plan. In the interior are rooms of cut stone, with niches in the walls, an aqueduct, and a reservoir. The quarries that supplied the stone for the Huanuco structures are still seen about half a mile away. Many traces of buildings of round stones in clay are found in the same vicinity.
Ground Plan—Huanuco.
Near Chupan, a tower is mentioned on the verge of a precipice overhanging the Rio Marañon. In the district of Junin there is a line or system of fortifications on the precipitous cliffs of a ravine, built mostly of micaceous slate. At Cuzco are some remains of the city of the Incas, and there is said to be some evidence that this city was founded on the ruins of another of an earlier epoch; the latter including part of the fortification of Ollantaytambo, built of stones cut in irregular forms, some of them of great size, and very neatly joined.
MONUMENTS OF TIAHUANACO.