The morning was busily employed in constructing scaling-ladders and mantlets, to protect the assailants from the stones that would be showered upon them, and shortly after the midday meal Juan Pizarro, at the head of forty horse, rode out of the city to the southward. This move was a feint to persuade the Peruvian leaders that he had gone on a foraging raid to replenish the exhausted store-houses of Cuzco. But as soon as the sudden darkness had fallen over the valley he turned aside and threaded his way up through the side valleys on to the open plain which was commanded by the curved northern and eastern face of the great fortress. Meanwhile another party on foot had left the city carrying the ladders and mantlets, and made their way up under cover of the darkness to the gorge of the Rodadero past the south-eastern flank of the fortress and met him on the plain. By this time, too, Don Hernando had taken his troop round by the north up the steep, paved roads towards the head of the pass from which de Soto and his companions had first seen the City of the Sun. The Sacsahuaman, the guardian fortress of the metropolis of the Land of the Four Regions, was at this time by far the most splendid and stately monument of architectural skill in the Western Hemisphere, and would have lost little by comparison with some of the strongest places of the Old World. It was, indeed, rather a fortified hill than a fortress--a Gibraltar of the land. On the side facing the city it towered up an almost sheer ascent of more than seven hundred feet, faced with massive masonry, and approachable only by narrow zigzag paths and flights of steps hewn in the living rock, and absolutely unapproachable by a hostile force so long as the summit or fortress proper was held even by a scanty garrison. The approaches to the hill at either end were ravines dominated by high walls built of stones so huge and solidly set together that they stand to-day as firm as the primæval rock on which they are founded. To the northward the true fighting face, commanding the little, level plain of the Rodadero, consists of three angled walls of cyclopean stonework, extending in the shape of a bent bow and rising in terraces one above the other to a height of some seventy feet, and the lower of these walls forms a curve of some eighteen hundred feet in length. At the time of the Conquest this colossal structure was crowned by three towers, the central and greatest of which was the true citadel, half palace, half fortress, built close to the perpendicular wall overlooking the city, and rising some sixty feet above its summit. These three towers have vanished, and much of the outworks are damaged now, torn down by the Conquerors to yield dressed stones for the building of the modern city, but, even after the ravages of three centuries, the Sacsahuaman remains to-day the greatest as well as the most marvellous structure of the New World.