"Huayna Capac doubtless received news of the earlier arrival of the white men on the Panama coast of South America, and the matter impressed him strongly. Tradition states that supernatural occurrences heralded the fall of the Inca Empire--flaming comets, earthquakes, and so forth. On his deathbed, according to tradition, Huayna recalled a prognostication that had been earlier made, that after twelve Incas had reigned--Huayna himself was the twelfth--a valorous race would appear, a white, bearded people, who would overcome the empire. 'I go to rest with our father the Sun,' he added. But it would appear that the great Inca had not always regarded the sun as an infallible power. Some years before, at the great feast of Raymi, the festival of the Sun, at Cuzco, the chief priest had observed that the monarch looked up from time to time at the orb with considerable freedom, an action prohibited and considered almost sacrilegious; and he inquired, why the Inca did this. Huayna replied: 'I tell you that our Father the Sun must have another lord more powerful than himself; a thing so inquiet and so bound in his course could not be a god.' Before he died Huayna Capac admonished his successor ever to carry on the noble traditions of their dynasty, in fulfilling their title as 'lovers of the poor.' Indeed, a civilization and rulers who had so organized the material resources of the realm and the life of the community that none were in want, and where no class oppressed another, as was indisputably the case under the Inca Empire, well merited such a title, and that the system should have been destroyed by the ruthless individualism of the Europeans is one of the most melancholy incidents in history."[33][34] [33] The author at the request of the Economic Circle of the National Liberal Club in London lectured before that body on "The Land Laws and Social System of the Incas" (1912). [34] _Ecuador_, loc. cit. These same remote uplands were the scene of the strenuous march of the Spaniards under Alvarado (whose earlier adventures we followed in Mexico), who affected to consider Quito as outside Pizarro's jurisdiction. Theirs was a dreadful march. Accustomed to warmer lands, men and horses starved with cold and famine in the inclement and foodless Cordillera. They were forced to eat the bodies of their horses and to boil herbs in their helmets for food. The march was made in vain, for Alvarado had been forestalled by Benalcazar, who, with Almagro, was the real conqueror of Ecuador. Ecuador, after the time of Independence, in which the famous Liberator, Bolivar, figured prominently, formed part of the republican incorporation with Columbia and Venezuela. Afterwards it was subject to revolutionary strife and civil wars of the most savage and bloodthirsty nature.