The blue changed to silver and the silver to crimson and gold. Then the sun, the glorious image of the Lord of Life, uprose in all his sudden splendour, and as his rays fell on the great golden jewel-rayed circle on the cathedral front, the Rainbow Banner ran swiftly up to the head of the flagstaff, and I, rising from my throne, bared my head and, turning my face to the rising sun, bowed myself before it, and at the same instant every head in the vast assembly was uncovered, and all, save the soldiers, fell on their knees and stretched out their hands to heaven in silent joy and thankfulness. Then I lifted up my voice and spoke the ancient Invocation to the Sun which generation after generation of my fathers had spoken from the same spot at the beginning of the feast of Raymi, and when I had ended this the Children of the Blood lifted up their voices after me and sang the long-silenced and yet never-forgotten hymn to the Sun, and then, standing before the kneeling multitude, I replaced the Llautu on my brow and proclaimed myself Inca and supreme Lord of the Land of the Four Regions in the name of my long-dead fathers, whose divine right to lordship had been preserved in me. And so I, Vilcaroya, son of Huayna-Capac, first fulfilled the prophecy that had been spoken in the Days of Darkness, and so did I come, as had been said, from one life into another through the shadow of death and the silence of the grave, with her whose love, now changed, though no less dear, had nerved me to face the ordeal of the strangest fate that had ever befallen one born in mortal shape. CHAPTER XIII HOW DJAMA PAID HIS DEBT It is one of the mysteries of this lower life of ours that men, meaning to do good in all honesty of heart, may yet do evil in the doing of it, and it was thus with me in the hour of my first triumph and rejoicing. I had pondered long and deeply over the strange treachery of Djama, and I had talked of it with Francis Hartness and the professor until I had come to see that he was in truth sorely afflicted with that madness which is born of the lust of gold, which, as they told me, is a disease of the soul that makes timid men rash and mild ones fierce and cunning, and may even turn the gentleness of woman into the pitiless rage of beasts of prey. It was through thinking of this that I came to see that I was by no means blameless myself for his madness and the treachery that had come from it.