A history of the Inca empire by the son of a Spanish captain and an Inca princess, raised in Cuzco. His chapters on the fortress above the city, Sacsayhuamán, are the fullest early description of Inca masonry and of the wonder it provoked.
Garcilaso de la Vega was born in Cuzco in 1539, a few years after the conquest, and left for Spain at twenty-one, never to return. Writing in old age, he drew on his childhood memories, on letters from Peruvian schoolfellows and on earlier Spanish chroniclers. His aim was to present the Inca state as a civilisation worthy of comparison with Rome.
He dwells on the great zigzag walls of Sacsayhuamán: the size of the stones, some of which he thought too big to have been moved by human effort at all; the fact that they were fitted without mortar, iron tools, draught animals or wheels; and the closeness of the joints between stones that are not squared but polygonal, each shaped to its neighbours. He also records the legend of the “tired stone” that the builders abandoned on its way to the fortress. Much of the fortress had already been quarried for the buildings of Spanish Cuzco when he was a boy, and he laments it.
The book, part by part
I Part I, Book VII, chs. 27–29: the fortress of Cuzco
The three great walls of Sacsayhuamán, the size and fitting of the stones, the towers and the tired stone; the destruction of the fortress after the conquest.
II Part I, Book III: the Temple of the Sun
The Coricancha, the temple of the Sun in Cuzco, its fine masonry and the gold that sheathed it.