The Inca took the first opportunity to appeal to Pizarro’s ruling passion by promising the Conqueror that if he would give him his freedom the Spaniards should have all the gold they wanted. Standing up in his prison and marking a place on the wall as high as he could reach, he said that he would fill the room up to that height with gold, and the adjoining room he would fill twice with silver as the price of his ransom. The brother of the Conqueror relates in his memoirs that the apartment to be filled with gold was thirty-five feet long by eighteen feet wide! Pizarro accepted Atahuallpa’s offer, though there is nothing to indicate that he held himself in any way bound to fulfil his part of the contract. Perfidious to the last degree in every relation of his life, it is not strange that he should have shown toward a captive and a heathen the same disregard for his word as appeared in his dealings with his best friends. Meantime he set to work assiduously, with the help of Father Valverde, to prove to Atahuallpa that the faith of the Spaniards was the only true faith; and his unanswerable argument was that the Spaniards’ God had brought victory to his children, while the Inca’s deity had deserted his own in their hour of need;—which the Inca found it impossible to deny. [Illustration: GENEALOGY OF FRANCISCO PIZARRO, CONQUEROR OF PERU.] While the Inca’s couriers were collecting the royal treasure from the temples and palaces of Tahuantinsuyo and despatching it from the four quarters of the empire to Cajamarca, the imprisoned monarch continued to live in the Spanish quarters, free to go about in the apartments that had been reserved for his use, and treated with the respect due to his rank, though always under strict surveillance. He was allowed the society of his wives, and could receive visits from his nobles who came daily to bring presents and to offer condolence. Through these messengers he learned that Huascar was plotting to escape from captivity and secure the throne, and that he had sent word to the Spaniards promising to raise a greater ransom than Atahuallpa could obtain, who had never been in Cuzco and knew nothing of its wealth. These reports both angered and alarmed the Inca, who knew very well that his half-brother’s claim to the throne would meet with a powerful support among his former subjects if Huascar should gain his freedom, and that such an event would of itself suffice to convince the whole nation that Huascar was favored by their deity, and that Atahuallpa’s captivity was the just punishment of a usurper. This condition of affairs was eminently satisfactory to Pizarro, who saw that whichever sovereign he chose to support must be in reality his vassal, and that between the two he was likely to collect into his coffers all the treasures of Peru.