But what was happening to the silent people among the mountain-tops who had stripped the Sun Temples of their offerings to enrich the adventurers from the Isles of Pearls? Their irrigating canals had been destroyed, the roads and the whole system of government broken up, the people killed in chronic fighting or by hardship in distant campaigns. Ten thousand of the fifteen thousand in Almagro’s Chilean army had died of cold in the mountains, or of heat and thirst in the desert. The people were starved, villages at a time, by the destruction of their crops. Moreover, the villages were given as fiefs to the Spaniards, who received all the tribute. Many were exhausted by dragging heavy artillery over the precipitous mountains. Garcilasso describes the immense beams that crushed the Indians staggering beneath their weight, who were relieved, only on account of necessity, at every two hundred paces. When Gonzalo Pizarro in coat of mail covered with cloth of gold made his triumphal entry as governor into the City of the Kings, the twenty-two pieces of cannon which saluted as the procession advanced through the streets, were carried on the shoulders of six thousand Indians. All these Indians were well trained in morality and sound doctrine by the clergy of Spain. And worst of all, deep within the mountains of Peru, hollowed by the gold and silver which they had removed to enrich a country of whose existence they would never be aware in any other way, the Indians were dying, thousands at a time. Skeletons concealed in old mines are now found, covered with fibers of silver melted by subterranean fires just beneath the cold desert. Mines now abandoned can be traced by piles of human bones. A pair of bright green arms, petitioning, stretched forth from the body which has disappeared, were discovered in the bottom of an ancient copper mine. The copper water had filtered through and covered them with a green sheen. Every finger is tense with supplication, every fiber as in the moment of death; not an eager tendon or nerve quivering to the surface failed of preservation. All are petrified in a bronze of nature’s molding. Stories are still told that the Spaniards drove ten thousand Indians at once to work in a Peruvian mine. When their strength was exhausted or they died from lack of food, the Spaniards drove up ten thousand more--an extravaganza of destruction matched only by the scale of nature’s waste. It must be said, however, that cruelty to the Indians was due not to Spanish law, but to the abuse of it. “In twenty-five years more than eight million Indians were worked to death in the mines of Peru.” “In a century, nine tenths of the people had been destroyed by overwork and cruelty.” No wonder Spain was able to equip an Armada! III Against such a dark background flamed the lurid Inquisition.