At regular intervals, “every ten thousand paces,” tambos were scattered along the roads, houses of pleasure for the Inca and waiting-houses for the relays of messengers of the Sun as they bore news of royal necessity, or brought fish from the sea or other delicacies from distant provinces to the Inca’s table. Garcilasso describes the stone stairs up to these inns “where the chairmen who carried the sedans did usually rest, where the Incas did sit for some time taking the air, and surveying in a most pleasant prospect all the high and lower parts of the mountains, which wore their coverings of snow, or on which the snow was falling, for from the tops of some mountains one might see a hundred leagues round.”
The Incas threw a swinging osier-bridge of spider-web construction across a vicious torrent to lead their armies over. So-called historians tell of bridges of feathers used in Inca days, but, as Garcilasso adds, “omit to declare the manner and fashion of them!”
The secrets of the Inca ruins are not yet told. For their industry moulded underground as well, connecting palaces and convents by hidden passageways, and chambers and depositories for army supplies like those made by the great Yupanqui in his campaign against the Chimus.
The subterranean system of water-works was stupendous. Near Cajamarca is a channel several hundred miles long paved with flagstones throughout its entire length. It forms the outlet to a little lake. Another aqueduct traversed the whole province of Cuntisuyu, twelve feet deep and over one hundred and twenty leagues long, leading waters of the snows to barren plains. Water was stored in cisterns on the mountain-tops. “They conducted rivers in straightened channels through hills of solid rock,” they brought water through pipes of gold from distant hot and cold springs, whose sources are now unknown. It trickled into the baths of the Inca through golden jaws of animals, birds, or snakes, and then welled
AN HEIR OF THE “MAKERS OF RUINS.”
over through properly regulated pathways to the terraces, where growing things were in want of irrigation.
This civilization had taken ages to evolve, as the development of certain plants and animals alone would show. It was reduced in a few years to an empire of ruin. One shivers at the “hideous energy of destruction evinced by man.” But in spite of all that has been done to annihilate the achievements of the Incas, benefits accruing from them still remain. “Makers of ruins” indeed, yet by them the present flimsy civilization exists. Upon their terraces, climbing to the mountain-tops, Indians now live in mud huts, little towns clutching at a far-off slope, apparently deserted but for the cemetery. Irrigating prospectors stand aghast before their mighty systems. The railway builder may take lessons in road construction.
There is practical value in ruins, if from them comes inspiration for modern industry. And there is poetry in ruins, because they speak of men and things which are gone, never to return, “the shrines of by-gone ideals, makable when they were made and then only.”