Bridges
Various means were used to bridge water courses. Rafts were used to cross wide meandering rivers. Bridges built of stone or floating reeds were used in marshy highlands. Inca rope bridges provided access across narrow valleys. A bridge across the ApurÃmac River, west of Cuzco, spanned a distance of 45 metres. Ravines were sometimes crossed by hanging baskets, or oroya, which could span distances of over 50 metres. Bridges were sometimes built in pairs.
Read more about this topic: Inca Road System
Famous quotes containing the word bridges:
“We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature.... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics—back to the jungle.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“... this single span,
Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give
The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)