Old Roads and New Roads

by William Bodham Donne

invaders; but even avarice, for a moment, yielded to admiration, when the file-leaders of Pizarro’s columns beheld for the first time the great Roads of the Incas. The Peruvians have been eloquently vindicated from the charge of barbarism by a modern historian, native of the great continent which Columbus discovered. From the moment when Cortes had gained the crest of the sierra of Ahualco, his progress was comparatively easy. Broad and even roads or long and solid causeways across the lakes and marshes conducted the Spaniards and their allies through the valley of Mexico or Tenochtitlan; and as they descended from the regions of sleet and snow, a gay and gorgeous panorama greeted them on every side, “of water, woodland, and cultivated plains,” diversified with bold and shadowy hills, and studded with the roofs and towers of populous cities. The running posts of the Aztecs rivalled in speed and regularity their brethren in Cathay, and Montezuma could boast that his dominions displayed at least one element of civilization—rapid communication between the provinces and the capital—which in that age and long afterwards was unknown to the empire of his rival and conqueror, the ‘white king beyond the seas.’ The roads of Peru were however more wonderful than even those of Mexico. We now borrow Mr. Prescott’s description.

“Those,” he says, “who may distrust the accounts of Peruvian industry, will find their doubts removed on a visit to the country. The traveller still meets, especially in the regions of the tableland, with memorials of the past, remains of temples, palaces, fortresses, terraced mountains, great military roads, aqueducts, and other public works, which, whatever degree of science they may display in their execution, astonish him by their number, the massive character of the materials, and the grandeur of the design. Among them, perhaps the most remarkable are the great roads, the broken remains of which are still in sufficient preservation to attest their former magnificence. There were many of their roads traversing different parts of the kingdom; but the most considerable were the two which extended from Quito to Cuzco, and again diverging from the capital, continued in a southern direction towards Chili.

“One of these roads passed over the grand plateau, and the other along the lowlands on the borders of the ocean. The former was much the more difficult achievement, from the character of the country. It was conducted over pathless sierras buried in snow; galleries were cut for leagues through the living rock; rivers were crossed by means of bridges that swung suspended in the air; precipices were scaled by stair-ways hewn out of the native bed; ravines of hideous depth were filled up with solid masonry: in short, all the difficulties that beset a wild and mountainous region, and which might appal the most courageous engineer of modern times, were encountered and successfully overcome. The length of the road, of which scattered fragments only remain, is variously estimated at from fifteen hundred to two thousand miles, and stone pillars, in the manner of European milestones, were erected at stated intervals of somewhat more than a league, all along the route.

“The other great road of the Incas lay through the level country between the Andes and the ocean. It was constructed in a different manner, as demanded by the nature of the ground, which was for the most part low, and much of it sandy. The causeway was raised on a high embankment of earth, and defended on either side by a parapet or wall of clay; and trees and odoriferous shrubs were placed along the margin, regaling the sense of the traveller with their perfume, and refreshing him by their shade, so grateful under the burning sky of the tropics. In the midst of sandy wastes, which occasionally intervened, where the light and volatile soil was incapable of sustaining a road, huge piles were driven into the ground to indicate the route of the traveller.”

Mr. Prescott might have added, that these magnificent works were constructed by a people ignorant of the use of iron, and unsupplied with wheel-carriages. The only beast of burden was the llama; and the long files of these patient and docile animals, winding along the broad causeways of the Andes recalled to the invaders the long

strings of mules stepping in single file along the rocky paths cut out from the sides of the Iberian sierras. Iron and fire-arms alone were wanting to the Peruvians to enable them to rival the most potent of the European kingdoms both in the arts and arms which maintain empires.

Of New Roads we shall speak very briefly, and rather of their effects than of their history. It would indeed be idle, in a rapid sketch like the present, to be diffuse upon a subject which those who travel may study with their own eyes, and those who stay at home may learn from many excellent recent books. [104]

The defiance of natural obstacles, the massive piles of masonry, the filling up of valleys, the perforated hill, the arch bestriding the river or the morass, the attraction of towns towards the line of transit, the creation of new markets, the connection of inland cities with the coast, the interweaving of populations hitherto isolated from one another, the increase of land-carriage, the running to and fro of thousands whose fathers were born and died in the same town or the same district,—all these are features in common with the Flaminian and Æmilian ways, and with the roads laid down by the genius and enterprise of Stephenson.

The old and the new roads, both in their resemblance and in their difference, suggest and express many of the organic distinctions and affinities of the old and the new phases of civilization.

For, apart from a feature of distinction already noticed, that in the ancient world all or nearly all public works were executed by and for the State, we may here remark that in England especially, where centralization is feeble, and local or personal interests are strong, the construction and conduct—the curatio, as the Romans phrased it—of great roads are entirely in the hands of voluntary associations, and the State interferes so far only as to shield individual life and property from wanton wrong and aggression. Secondly, that the primary purpose of the Roman Viæ was that of extending and securing conquest, while the primary end of the railroad is to diffuse and facilitate commerce. In the one case, civilization was a fortunate accident. Gaul imbibed the arts and manners of Latium, because Gaul had been first subdued, and was permanently held by the strong Roman arm. But, in the other case, traffic and communication are the direct objects, while war, if hereafter wars should arise, will be the crime or the infelicity of those who engage in it. War indeed, as all ancient history shows, was the normal condition of Heathendom; Peace, although so often in the past ages rudely interrupted, is the normal state of Christendom. Again, the Roman

road rendered invasion, encroachment, and the lust of conquest easy to project, execute, and gratify; whereas the modern Viæ, by bringing nations into speedy and immediate contact with one another, are diminishing with each year the chances of hostile collision. The Roman roads, with all their magnificent apparatus of bridges, causeways, of uplifted hollows and levelled heights, were constructed at an enormous cost of manual labour and of personal oppression and suffering, and with comparatively a trifling amount of science. But the railroad is the idea of the philosopher embodied by the free and cheerfully accorded toil of the labourer and artizan. When an Appius Claudius or a Marcus Flaminius determined to mark the year of his consulship or censorship by some colossal road-work, the husbandman was summoned from his field, the herdsman was brought from his pasture-ground, a contingent was demanded from the allies, a conscription was enforced upon the subjects of Rome, harder task-work was imposed on the slave, and more irksome punishment inflicted upon the prisoner. [107] The great works of antiquity indeed, from the pyramids downward to

the mausoleum of Hadrian, are too often the monuments of human toil, privation, and death. But the roads of our more fortunate times are not cemented with the tears of myriads, nor reared upon piles of bleached bones. On the contrary, the construction of them has given employment to thousands who, but for them, would have crowded to the parish for relief, or have wandered anxiously in search of work, or sauntered listlessly at the alehouse door in despair of finding it. The great radii of peaceful communication have been executed by willing hands, and a fair day’s wages has been the recompense of a fair day’s work. We do not undervalue the skill and energy of the engineers of antiquity. Yet by their fruits we know and judge of the works of the Curatores Viarum, and of our Brunels and Stephensons. “Peace has its victories no less than war.” And the modern road does not more surpass the ancient in the science of its constructors, than in the objects for which it has been planned and executed.