Note 15 — Chapter V · TO THE CITY OF THE SUN

There were no signs to show that this lovely and wonderful land had but lately been swept by the tempest of civil war. Everything was in perfect order, and every man, woman, and child seemed contented with what Heaven and the Inca had bestowed. They passed strong fortresses fully garrisoned, and guarding narrow passages and gorges which looked impregnable if well defended, and they crossed broad, swift-flowing rivers by swinging bridges held up by cables which, huge as they were, looked like threads when stretched across the vast abysses, and so at last they came to the greatest of all these bridges, which hung in mid-air from rock-wall to rock-wall, looking frail and slender as a spider’s web as it hung more than a hundred feet above the dark, swift-flowing and hoarsely roaring torrent of the “Great Speaker.”15