In the plaza the guards were drawn up in a hollow square round the stake, on either side of which stood a company of torchbearers. The procession moved slowly round to the side of the square which had been left open, and there, halting in front of the stake, the Notary stood out with a parchment in his hand, and in a loud voice read the indictment on which the Inca had been found guilty and the sentence that the court had passed upon him. All round the sides of the plaza stood dense throngs of the people, silent, cowed, and helpless, yet even now scarcely believing that their deity would permit his crowned and sceptred son to die without launching some fearful vengeance upon the heads of the impious strangers. But there was no thought now of revolt or rescue, for the moment of the massacre with all its horrors was still fresh in their minds, and in every direction they saw the terrible war-beasts ready to ride them down, and the still more dreaded fire-tubes, or llapa-pipes as they called them, ready to rain fire and death and thunder upon them as they had done before. Pizarro had expressly ordered that they should be permitted to be present, for now that he had finally decided that the Inca’s death was inevitable he was determined that his end should be made as awful and impressive as possible, so that the news of it might be carried throughout the length and breadth of the land and convince those who had not beheld it how vain all opposition to his will must ever be. When the Notary had finished his reading Valverde went to the Inca’s side with a small crucifix in his hand and, pointing to the crucifix and then to the stake with the fagots piled about it, he gave him to understand by signs and the few words of Quichua that he had acquired that the moment of his final choice had now come. If he would take the symbol of the faith in his hand and speak the one word, “Credo,” then a swift and painless death should be his, and after that salvation. If he refused--there were the fagots and the torches, a death of lingering agony, and after that damnation and eternal torment. In such an awful moment it could not but be that the doomed Inca’s thoughts should go back to that hour in Quito when he had himself doomed three generations of men, women, and children, and among them his own brother, to the same death of fiery torment which awaited him now. He looked mutely from the crucifix to the priest, and from the crucifix to the stake and the executioner standing beside it with the torch that was to light his death-pyre. Then his thoughts flew back again into the past, and he saw his guilty mother dragged away to the fagot-piled scaffold. He saw the torches waving in the frenzied hands of the great Huayna’s wives, then he saw them hurled into the fagots, and as the flames sprang up he heard the shrieks and screams of agony mingling with the shrill strains of the Death Chant.