1 undescribed
in the geographical literature of southern Peru. We decided not to
use either pass, but to go straight down the Urubamba river road. It
led us into a fascinating country.

Two leagues beyond Piri, at Salapunco, the road skirts the base of
precipitous cliffs, the beginnings of a wonderful mass of granite
mountains which have made Uilcapampa more difficult of access than the
surrounding highlands which are composed of schists, conglomerates, and
limestone. Salapunco is the natural gateway to the ancient province,
but it was closed for centuries by the combined efforts of nature and
man. The Urubamba River, in cutting its way through the granite range,
forms rapids too dangerous to be passable and precipices which can
be scaled only with great effort and considerable peril. At one
time a footpath probably ran near the river, where the Indians,
by crawling along the face of the cliff and sometimes swinging from
one ledge to another on hanging vines, were able to make their way
to any of the alluvial terraces down the valley. Another path may
have gone over the cliffs above the fortress, where we noticed, in
various inaccessible places, the remains of walls built on narrow
ledges. They were too narrow and too irregular to have been intended
to support agricultural terraces. They may have been built to make the
cliff more precipitous. They probably represent the foundations of an
old trail. To defend these ancient paths we found that prehistoric
man had built, at the foot of the precipices, close to the river,
a small but powerful fortress whose ruins now pass by the name of
Salapunco; sala = ruins; punco = gateway. Fashioned after famous
Sacsahuaman and resembling it in the irregular character of the large
ashlars and also by reason of the salients and reentrant angles which
enabled its defenders to prevent the walls being successfully scaled,
it presents an interesting problem.

Commanding as it does the entrance to the valley of Torontoy,
Salapunco may have been built by some ancient chief to enable him
to levy tribute on all who passed. My first impression was that
the fortress was placed here, at the end of the temperate zone,
to defend the valleys of Urubamba and Ollantaytambo against savage
enemies coming up from the forests of the Amazon. On the other hand,
it is possible that Salapunco was built by the tribes occupying the
fastnesses of Uilcapampa as an outpost to defend them against enemies
coming d