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Updated: June 27, 2025
About a mile northeast of Sacsahuaman are several small artificial hills, partly covered with vegetation, which seem to be composed entirely of gray-blue rock chips chips from the great limestone blocks quarried here for the "fortress" and later conveyed with the utmost pains down to Sacsahuaman. They represent the labor of countless thousands of quarrymen.
The lowest terrace of the "fortress" is faced with colossal boulders, many of which weigh ten tons and some weigh more than twenty tons, yet all are fitted together with the utmost precision. I have visited Sacsahuaman repeatedly. Each time it invariably overwhelms and astounds. To a superstitious Indian who sees these walls for the first time, they must seem to have been built by gods.
We spent the day wandering about among the huge ruins of the Sacsahuaman, and exploring the wonders of the carved rocks and underground passages and altar-places, which have been the marvel of every traveller to the hills about Cuzco, and all that I knew of the upper works I told my companions, and showed them as well as I could what the mighty fastness had been in the days of its pride and unbroken strength.
At this moment we saw Djama come walking down the path towards us, and at the sight of him there came to me, like the stab of a dagger of ice, the sudden memory that, at the moment I was speaking of my treasure-house under the Sacsahuaman, I had heard a gentle rustle behind some bushes close by the path, and a sound like that of a stealthy tread.
The ruins of Sacsahuaman represent not only an incredible amount of human labor, but also a very remarkable governmental organization.
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.
Is it not reasonable to suppose that a people to whom stone-faced terraces meant so much in the way of life-giving food should have sometimes built massive terraces of Cyclopean character, like Sacsahuaman, as an offering to the deity who first taught them terrace construction?
Francis Hartness and I came last out of the passage, and I asked him to lead the soldiers out of the hollow and across the plain to the wall of the Sacsahuaman, where I would join them, and as soon as they had gone out of the hollow and were lost to sight I went to the hole among the bushes where the hidden stone was and released the chain and let the water flow back into its old place, till the entrance to the Hall of Gold was only the same dark, stagnant pool that any wanderer might find at the bottom of the cloven stairway.
Fashioned after famous Sacsahuaman and resembling it in the irregular character of the large ashlars and also by reason of the salients and reëntrant angles which enabled its defenders to prevent the walls being successfully scaled, it presents an interesting problem.
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