Modern visitors wanting a visceral taste of Machu Picchu's impregnability can hike 20 minutes past the city to a sheer granite cliff face. Public access beyond this point is prohibited, but the wooden barricade adorned with a prohibido el paso sign is only for the benefit of the insane. From here the trail threads its way down across the precipitous cliff face on a narrow ledge. The sight makes your skin crawl. Halfway across, stretched over thin air, is a large gap spanned by a few logs that Inca guards once slid back and forth as a "drawbridge" to control access. An invading army stood no chance.
But how did a civilization with no iron tools and no wheel manage to chisel and move huge 15-ton blocks along this Andean ridge? Large teams of men apparently dragged the boulders from nearby quarries, positioning them atop building walls via earthen ramps. Half-worked boulders at the small quarry inside Machu Picchu still bear notches where bronze chisels were inserted into cracks. Experts believe heat was then applied to help split boulders. The building blocks were sculpted to fit one another precisely, without mortar—no small task considering how many times the massive blocks had to be moved to get the right fit. Today, even after centuries of earthquakes and weather, you can't slip a razor blade between the stones of some walls.
Archeologists speculate Machu Picchu was built in the 1400s as more than simply a citadel or fortress. Its alignment with sacred Inca mountains, rivers and astronomical points suggests agreement with celestial and terrestrial deities was at least as important as inaccessibility from invaders.
A short walk up the pyramidal mount called Intihuatana in the center of Machu Picchu gives visitors a vivid sense of the city's spiritual magnetism. At the top is a man-sized obelisk. It's said that Inca priests "lassoed" the sun to the obelisk at each winter solstice so it couldn't continue its northward retreat and leave them in darkness. In Quechuan, the language of the Incas, Intihuatana is interpreted by some to mean "hitching post of the sun."
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