Again a declining day in the fair Vale of Xilcala. Approaching by the gorge and nearing its head, is a column of the Inca’s warriors, some of them mounted and clad in Viracocha mail, and escorting a train of _hamacas_. It is led by a cavalier whose armor bears many a mark of hostile blade unknown when he rode out from the valley, long and stormy months ago. The command halts at his signal, and riding back to one of the _hamacas_, he dismounts and assists its precious burden to alight. Together they walk forward to the edge of the lake, and Rava looks long and dreamily over its unruffled surface and mirrored mountains. There is the rocky promontory with its crowning of roofs and soft-gleaming walls; the gently-sloping shores with their fields and groves; the _andenes_ clinging to the lower steeps, and the pinnacles towering above; and far across the valley, a hazy canyon from which these two—long ago, it seems to them now—looked out over the welcome peacefulness. The sheltering peaks are touched with rose; blue, transparent shadows are stealing up the eastern scarp; and across the still reflections creeps one thin, silvery arrow in the wake of a balsa urged shoreward by a fisherman. His distant, plaintive song floats across the lake and breaks into the murmur of the near-by stream. No other movement in all the tranquillity; no other sound, unless the whispered, liquid notes of the rippling on the pebbles of the beach. Rava sighs, "Oh, Cristoval, is it not beautiful!" "Most fair!" says the cavalier, as he said long ago, and passes a steel-clad arm about her as he meets the deep eyes, now brimming. There they dwelt—Cristoval and Rava—remote from the dreary scenes of the wars among the Spaniards which followed close upon the fall of the Empire of the Incas. They found peace and happiness in a love enduring as their lives. Happiness, it is true, with a deep, life-long undertone of grief, for Tavantinsuyu and its last Inca; but their sorrow drew them nearer, as sorrow must. They found, too, palliative in alleviating many an ill brought upon the people outside their valley by the subjugation, and the twain—after their marriage, the Autauchi Cristoval and the Palla Rava—are remembered in undying tradition.