Atahualpa, astonished at his fate, endeavoured to avert it by tears, by promises, and by entreaties; but pity never touched the unfeeling heart of Pizarro. He ordered him to be led instantly to execution, and the cruel priest, after having prostituted his sacred office to confirm the wicked sentence, offered to console, and attempted to convert him. The dread of a cruel death, extorted from the trembling victim his consent to be baptized. The ceremony was performed; and Atahualpa, instead of being burnt alive, was strangled at the stake. Pizarro then proceeded in his career of cruelty and rapacity, till, in ten years, he subdued the whole of this great empire, and divided it among his followers. In making the division, he allotted the richest and finest provinces to himself and his favourites, giving the less valuable to Almagro and his friends. This partiality highly offended Almagro, who thought his claims equal to Pizarro's, and this led to open hostilities; when Almagro being taken prisoner, he was beheaded in prison by order of Pizarro. Soon after this, Pizarro himself was assassinated in his palace by a party of Almagro's friends, headed by the son of Almagro, in revenge for the death of his father. Some time before this, the cruel and bigoted priest, Val de Viridi, had been beaten to death with the butt end of muskets, in the island of Puma, at the instigation of Almagro. Thus retributive justice, in the end, overtook these unjust and cruel men. [Illustration] CHAPTER XII. PARLEY DESCRIBES THE NATURAL BEAUTIES OF AMERICA. Let us now leave for a while the cruel Spaniards, and talk about the beauties of nature, in these new discovered countries. In these extensive regions, every thing appeared new and wonderful; not only the inhabitants, but the whole face of nature was totally different from anything that had been seen in Europe. Grand ridges of mountains, numerous volcanoes, some of them, though under the Equator, covered with perpetual snows. Noble rivers, whose course, in several instances, exceeds three thousand miles. Here are found the palm-tree, the cedar, the tamarind, the guaiacum, the sassafras, the hickory, the chestnut, the walnut of many different kinds, the wild cherry (sometimes a hundred feet high), and more than fifty different sorts of oak. The plane, of which there are two kinds, one found in Asia, which is called the oriental plane: that found in America is called the occidental plane; but the Americans call it button-wood, or sycamore. Its foliage is richer, and its leaves of a more beautiful green than the oriental. It grows to a great size. The cypress is perhaps the largest of the American trees; it is a more than a hundred and twenty feet high; and the diameter of the trunk at forty or fifty feet from the ground is sometimes eight or ten feet.