ion to the obvious cost, might have been caused by the
supreme vanity of a great soldier. On the other hand, the ancient
Peruvians were religious rather than warlike, more inclined to worship
the sun than to fight great battles. Was Sacsahuaman due to the desire
to please, at whatever cost, the god that fructified the crops which
grew on terraces? It is not surprising that the Spanish conquerors,
warriors themselves and descendants of twenty generations of a fighting
race, accustomed as they were to the salients of European fortresses,
should have looked upon Sacsahuaman as a fortress. To them the military
use of its bastions was perfectly obvious. The value of its salients
and reentrant angles was not likely to be overlooked, for it had
been only recently acquired by their crusading ancestors. The height
and strength of its powerful walls enabled it to be of the greatest
service to the soldiers of that day. They saw that it was virtually
impregnable for any artillery with which they were familiar. In fact,
in the wars of the Incas and those which followed Pizarro's entry
into Cuzco, Sacsahuaman was repeatedly used as a fortress.

So it probably never occurred to the Spaniards that the Peruvians,
who knew nothing of explosive powder or the use of artillery, did
not construct Sacsahuaman in order to withstand such a siege as the
fortresses of Europe were only too familiar with. So natural did it
seem to the first Europeans who saw it to regard it as a fortress
that it has seldom been thought of in any other way. The fact that
the sacred city of Cuzco was more likely to be attacked by invaders
coming up the valley, or even over the gentle slopes from the west,
or through the pass from the north which for centuries has been
used as part of the main highway of the central Andes, never seems
to have troubled writers who regarded Sacsahuaman essentially as a
fortress. It may be that Sacsahuaman was once used as a place where
the votaries of the sun gathered at the end of the rainy season to
celebrate the vernal equinox, and at the summer solstice to pray for
the sun's return from his "farthest north." In any case I believe
that the enormous cost of its construction shows that it was probably
intended for religious rather than military purposes. It is more
likely to have been an ancient shrine than a mighty fortress.

It now becomes necessary, in order to explain my explorations north
of Cuzco, to ask the reader's attention t