They Accordingly Undertook, And Executed By Prodigious Labour, A Broad And Easy Road Through The Mountains Of Five Hundred Leagues In Length, In The Course Of Which They Had Often To Dig Away Vast Rocks, And To Fill Up Valleys And Precipices Of Thirty To Forty Yards In Depth.

It is said that this road, when first made, was so smooth and level that it would have admitted

A coach with the utmost ease through its whole length; but since that time it has suffered great injuries, especially during the wars between the Spaniards and the Peruvians, having been broken up in many places, on purpose to obstruct the invasion of the enemy. The grandeur and difficulty of this vast undertaking may be readily conceived, by considering the labour and cost which has been expended in Spain to level only two leagues of a mountain road between Segovia and Guadarrama, and which after all has never been brought to any degree of perfection, although the usual passage of the king and court on travelling to or from Andalusia or the kingdom of Toledo. Not satisfied with this first astonishing labour, the Peruvians soon afterwards undertook another of a similar and no less grand and difficult kind. Huana Capac was fond of visiting the kingdom of Quito which he had conquered, and proposed to travel thither from Cuzco by way of the plain, so as to visit the whole of his extensive dominions. For his accommodation likewise, his subjects undertook to make a road also in the plain; and for this purpose they constructed high mounds of earth across all the small vallies formed by the various rivers and torrents which descend from the mountain, that the road might be everywhere smooth and level This road was near forty feet wide, and where it crossed the sandy heights which intervene betwixt the verdant vallies of the torrents, it was marked on each side by stakes, forming palings in straight lines to prevent any one losing the way. This road was five hundred leagues in length like that of the mountain; but the palings are now wanting in many places, the wood of which they were constructed having been used by the Spaniards for fuel during the war; but the mounds still exist across the vallies, and most of them are yet tolerably entire, by which the grandeur of the entire work may be judged of. In his journeys to and from Quito, Huana Capac used to go by one of these roads and return by the other; and during his whole journey his subjects used to strew the way with branches and flowers of the richest perfume.

Besides the two great roads already mentioned, Huana Capac ordered to be built on the mountain road a number of large palaces, at the distance of a days journey from each other, having a prodigious number of apartments, sufficient to lodge his own personal suite and all his army. Such were likewise built along the road in the plain, but not so numerous or so near each other as on the mountain road, as these palaces of the plain had all to be placed on the sides of the rivers for convenience and the procurement of provisions and other necessaries; so that they were in some places eight or ten leagues distant from each other, and in other places fifteen or twenty leagues.

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