So the ships sailed away northwards and were lost in the mists and clouds, and the little band stood together on the rocks of Gallo watching them go until they had faded like ghosts into the gloom and the shadows drew closer round them and the night fell dark and drear over the desolate spot. But, though the little band of heroes knew it not, far away to the southward, above the clouds which lay over them like a pall, the new-risen moon was shining in a clear and cloudless sky, gemmed with thousands of stars more brilliant than they had ever seen, over gleaming fields of spotless snow and soaring peaks of everlasting ice, through the midst of which they were one day to march to the long-dreamed-of El-Dorado and to the glory and the shame that was to be the reward of their valour and their sins. BOOK I CHAPTER I. THE SUNSET OF AN EMPIRE The sun had set over Quito, “the City of the Great Ravine,” but high above the night that had fallen upon the valley rounded tops and pinnacles of rock, gleaming domes of snow and shining minarets of ice were glowing with rosy fires changing every moment the wondrous hues which they borrowed from the light that seemed to stream across them from an unseen source. The unclouded sky was still a fathomless sea of radiance, and, high above all its attendant peaks, the mighty dome of Chimborazo towered up from the gloom into the light, crowned with a canopy of smoke whose rolling clouds seemed like a glorified chaos of light and darkness, of the sombre shadows and brilliant, many-coloured radiance, suspended between heaven and earth. On a couch of the softest textures ever woven by human hands, draped over a framework of precious woods clamped and in a great part overlaid with gold, Huayna-Capac, the last of the long line of Incas descended from the Divine Manco and his sister-wife Mama-Occlu, son and daughter of the Sun, lay dying. The heir of the great Inca Yupanqui, during his long life of unsparing conquest and yet wise and most merciful rule, had extended the empire of the Children of the Sun until, from the burning regions of the North, beyond the central line of the earth, to the arid deserts of the far South, and from the trackless forests of the East to the shores of the Western sea, all the lands and peoples of Tavantinsuyu[1] owned, with gladness and without question, the glory of the Rainbow Banner and the just, yet rigid, sway of the Son of the Sun. All that the valour of his soldiers, the wisdom of his councillors, and his own imperial genius could do had been done, and in all the world there was no other empire whose ruler was so completely all-powerful and whose subjects were so peaceful, prosperous, and contented as his were. It was an empire at its zenith. It had reached that acme of military strength and social organisation beyond which, as the history of the world would seem to tell us, the Fates who govern human destiny do not permit a human society to develop.