“Señor, he who could find mercy for the heathen or the idolater in his heart hath commonly little room left for the love of God. The Inca hath already passed beyond the civil power into the keeping of the Church, which now by my hands gives him back into thine for the execution of his body as an obstinate heretic and idolater as mercifully as maybe and without shedding of blood. Do thou, as a true son of the Church, see to this, and, shouldst thou need any excuse to thy conscience, find it in this charge of mine.” Pizarro bowed and crossed himself, feeling now much lighter at heart, for to such a man in such an age this was full and sufficient warranty for the doing of any cruelty or injustice. “Since it is the Church that bids me, by thy lips, holy father,” he said gravely, “my responsibility in the matter is discharged. I have come to tell thee and the prisoner of the Church that all things are ready for the carrying out of the sentence.” “Then let us go,” said Valverde, solemnly clasping his hands and casting his eyes up to the roof; “and may God and the Saints in their infinite mercy change his heart even at the last minute of the eleventh hour!” The Inca’s chains were then struck off and he was led out from the room into the forecourt of the fortress, and there the procession of death was formed between two rows of torchbearers. First went Brother Joachim bearing the great white crucifix aloft, then came Valverde in his full canonicals chanting the Mass for the Dying with the four monks who came behind him walking two and two on either side of the Inca, who, with his hands clasped behind him, gazed upwards to the sky gemmed with the innumerable stars of two hemispheres and flooded by the white radiance of the moon, the sister-wife of his Father and Lord the Sun. Beneath him lay the broad moonlit valley spread out in ghostly and almost unearthly beauty, and to his mourning eyes it seemed as though it had never looked so beautiful before. Over against him the dim horizon was closed in by range after range of terraced hills, capped by their domes and pinnacles of bare rock, and behind him towered the tremendous snow and ice-crowned bulwarks which he, in the mad confidence of his strength and ignorance, had left unguarded, and which had so failed to keep out these pitiless and arrogant strangers who were now taking him helpless to his doom.