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Show PLATEAU OF C.A.XAM.ARCA. 417 and rope bridges (Puentes de Hamaca or de Mll.roma), and there were also aqueducts, or arrangements for bringing water to the Tambos (hostelries or caravanserais), and to the fortresses. Both systems of roads were directed to the central point, Cuzco, the seat of government of the great empire, in 13° 31' South latitude, and which is placed, according to Pentland's map of Bolivia, 10,676 Paris or 11,378 English feet above the level of the sea. As the Peruvians employed no wheel carriages, and the roads were consequently only designed for the march of troops, for men carrying burdens, and for lightly laden lamas, we find them occasionally interrupted, on account of the steepness of the mountains, by long flights of steps, provided with resting-places at suitable intervals. Francisco Pizarro and Diego Almagro, who on their distant expeditions used the military roads of the Incas with so much advantage, found great difficulties for the Spanish cavalry at the places where these steps occurred. (6) The impediment presented to their march on these occasions was so much the greater, because, in the early times of the Conquista, the Spaniards used only horses instead of the carefully treading mule, who in the difficult parts of the mountains seems to deliberate on every step he takes. It was not until a later period that mules were employed. Sarmiento, who saw the roads of the Incas whilst they were still in a perfect state of preservation, asks, in a " Relacion" which long lay unread, buried in the Library of the Escurial, "how a nation unacquainted with the use of iron could have completed such grand works in so high and rocky a region (' Ca~inos tan grandes y tan sovervios'), extending from Cuzco to Quito on the one hand, and to the coast of Chili on the other? The Emperor Charles," he adds, "with all his power, could not accomplish even a part of what the well-ordered Government of the Incas effected through the obedient people over whom they ruled." Hernando Pizarro, the most educated and civilized of the three brothers, who for his misdeeds suffered a twenty years' imprisonment at Medina del Campo, and died at last, at a hundred years of age, " in the odor of sanctity," " en olor de Santidad," exclaims: "In the whole of Christendom there are nowhere such fine roads as those which we here admire." The two important capitals and seats of government of the Incas, Cuzco and |