He had strength to swing the ponderous door and place the bar, but no more, and sank down beneath armor that weighed a ton. He lay straining to suppress his heavy breathing that he might listen for the approach of the infantry. He heard them presently, and rose to his knees, gripping his sword. They seemed so long in passing that he fancied they were gathering about the door; and expecting every instant to hear it assaulted, he gained his feet, praying for new strength to fight. But they passed, and the street grew quiet. Still he hearkened, minute after minute, for sounds which might indicate whether the Antis had been struck, until, after what must have been an hour, he heard the troop straggling by on its return to the square. An interval, and a party of the infantry tramped by in the same direction, and he surmised from the smallness of the number that it had divided into squads to search the streets. After this, a welcome silence. Exhausted, desperate at the catastrophe which had so abruptly blocked his project, the cavalier entered the court to seek the fountain whose plash had been torturing his thirst. The place, evidently one of the numerous palaces, was quite deserted. Doors stood open upon dark chambers, but there was neither light, sound, nor sign of life, and he traversed the dusky courts in solitude. *CHAPTER XXXIV* _*In the Burning Palace*_ On the rampart of the Sachsahuaman, apart from his generals, wrapped in his cloak, and shrouded more impenetrably by something which forbade approach; a dark silhouette against a sky wilder and more terrible than words can describe; unspeakably solemn before the havoc wrought at his command, stood the Inca. In his grim silence and immobility, in his relentless wielding of a power little less absolute than that of a god, he took on the sinister majesty of the spectacle his fiat had created. When flame followed the fall of the first arrow, he had buried his face in his cloak. Slowly lowering his arm, he had looked on with countenance inflexible as bronze while destruction progressed in leaps and bounds. After this, not the tremor of a muscle. To his nobles, quailing and awe-stricken at the sublime horror of the scene, he was never before so much a king.