At the foot of a broad flight of steps leading up to a wide terrace running the whole length of the palace Manco dismounted and asked the Spanish cavaliers to do the same. Then he led the way on to the terrace. He now made a sign to the litter-bearers, who at once set their burdens down, and then for the first time he approached them. He went first to the one in which Mama-Oello was lying, and with gracious deference helped her to rise. Then he went to the other, and as Nahua rose and stood beside him a mighty shout burst from tens of thousands of throats and went echoing across the river and along the rock-walls of the valley, and at the same instant every warrior within sight of the terrace dropped on his knees and spread out his arms towards it, and Nahua’s name, uttered at the same instant by tens of thousands of lips, went up to heaven in one great cry of joy and thankfulness. “You see, Señores,” said Manco, turning to the Spaniards, “that mine would not have been the only heart that you would have filled with darkness and sorrow had you not been as brothers rather than as enemies to one who hereafter, even if he should fall by your hands, will take none but loving memories of you with him to the Mansions of the Sun.” Toil-worn and battle-hardened as they were the Spaniards were still men, and for the most part gentlemen, and more than one of them looked at this touching spectacle of thankful devotion through a mist which was certainly not in the clear sky or the translucent air of the Sierras, and this mist was not far from becoming veritable tears when Nahua, at a word in Quichua from Manco, left his side and went to them one after the other, beginning with de Soto, and took their rough right hands in hers and bowed her lovely head over them till her lips touched them. It was her act of public thanks for the great service they had done her and her people, and although the army knew that ere many days were past they must meet these same men in bitter and unsparing battle every man of all the thousands within sight sprang to his feet again, waving his weapon and making the rocks and the fortress’ walls ring with his cheers. It was a moment in which a lasting peace might have been made and the greatest empire and the most perfect civilisation of the New World saved from utter and irretrievable ruin. If the majority of the Spaniards had been such men as those who were now standing with the Inca on the terrace of his palace they might have been to Peru what two centuries and a half later the English became to India. But this was not to be. They had brought with them into the land the twin curses of insatiable greed and invincible religious intolerance, and these were ere long to prove the utter undoing of both conquerors and conquered.