american-holocaust

44 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTbuilt in the Spanish manner with regular streets, and has several subject villageswithin sight of it. The population of the town and the surroundingcountryside was so great that, by the Spaniards' reckoning, a hundred thousandpeople collected in the main square every day. The markets and streetswere so full that every single person seemed to be there. 73A hundred thousand people gathered in the marketplace of a single provincialcity each day? Many historians intuitively have supposed this to bean exaggeration, but after conducting the most detailed and exhaustive ofPeru's population histories to date, Noble David Cook has concluded thatthe number "does not appear extravagant." 74To feed a population as enormous as this, and a population spread outover such a vast area, the Incas cut miles upon miles of intricate and preciselyaligned canals and irrigated agricultural terraces from the steep Andeanhillsides in their mountain home; and to move those foodstuffs andother supplies from one area to another they constructed more than 25,000miles of wide highways and connecting roads. Both engineering feats astonishedthe Spaniards when they first beheld them. And for good reason:modern archaeologists and hydrologists are just as amazed, having discoveredthat most of these grand public works projects were planned, engineered,and constructed to within a degree or two of slope and angle thatcomputer analyses of the terrain now regard as perfect. At the time ofEuropean contact, the thickly populated Andean valleys were criss-crossedwith irrigation canals in such abundance, wrote one conquistador, that itwas difficult, even upon seeing, to believe. They were found "both in uplandand low-lying regions and on the sides of the hills and the foothillsdescending to the valleys, and these were connected to others, running indifferent directions. All this makes it a pleasure to cross these valleys," headded, "because it is as though one were walking amidst gardens and coolgroves. . . . There is always verdure along these ditches, and grass growsbeside many of them, where the horses graze, and among the trees andbushes there is a multitude of birds, doves, wild turkey, pheasants, partridge,and also deer. Vermin, snakes, reptiles, wolves-there are none." 75Describing the Incas' "grand and beautiful highway" that ran alongthe coast and across the plains was something in which all the early chroniclersdelighted. From fifteen to twenty-four feet in width, and "borderedby a mighty wall more than a fathom high," this "carefully tended" roadway"ran beneath trees, and in many spots the fruit laden boughs hungover the road," recalled Pedro de Cieza de Leon, "and all the trees werealive with many kinds of birds and parrots and other winged creatures." 76The great highway and other roads dipped through steep coastal valleys,hugged the edges of precipitous cliffs, tunneled through rock, and climbedin stepladder fashion up sheer stone walls.Encountering rivers and lakes in the paths of their roadways, the peo-