Once upon a time there was a garden of pleasure where flowers of gold opened from silver stalks, some full blown, others in close golden bud. Upon the walls crept strange insects and snails, so perfectly counterfeited in gold “that they wanted nothing but motion.” Even the trees and the paths were of gold. Birds of gold perched upon golden boughs, their heads thrown back in silent song, and upon silver leaves gold butterflies poised in the sunlight upon their little golden feet. Humming-birds of gold sipped imaginary honey from long, golden flower-bells. The old chronicler, Cieza de Leon, says that one garden “was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as the leaves and cobs being of that metal; ... they were so well planted that even in a high wind they were not torn up; and besides all this they had more than twenty golden sheep with their lambs, and the shepherds with their slings and hooks to watch them, all made of the same metal.” Near by were vast heaps of gold and silver, waiting to be wrought into wonderful shapes. The Inca ate within gold-lined walls, sitting “commonly on a stool of massive gold set on a large, square plate of gold which served for a pedestal.” He ate from gold dishes rare viands from distant provinces, prepared in gold pots and kettles in a kitchen supplied with piles of golden fagots! He bathed in cisterns of gold in water conducted through golden pipes from distant springs. Francisco Lopez says: “Nay, there was nothing in all that empire (the most flourishing of the whole world) whereof there was not a counterfeit in pure gold.” As hunger could not be satisfied with gold, it was valued only for its shining beauty, esteemed by the Incas’ subjects only as a symbol of the Sun, those “tears which the Sun has wept.” They naturally belonged to him. His worshippers even cast them into lakes, mirrors in which he looks upon his own reflected glory, and “sinks at last still gazing on it.” The greatest of all Sun-Temples was Coricancha--the Ingot of Gold--where every implement in use, even to spades and rakes of the garden, was made of gold. Huayna Ccapac had learned from the god Uiracocha that a superior people would conquer the Incas and introduce a new religion. They would come after the reign of twelve kings; and “In me,” he said, “the number of twelve kings is completed.”