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.
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