While the Spaniards were holding their council in the camp in the great square, Manco and Ruminavi were holding another no less momentous in one of the chambers of the central tower which crowned the fortress of the Sacsahuaman. Nor was their debate less anxious than that of Hernando Pizarro and his companions. The truth was that the feeding of the vast host which had now for months been encompassing Cuzco was fast becoming impossible. More than that, the time for sowing had come, and this among the Incas and their people had for ever been the season of universal religious observance. It was to them what Holy Week was to the Catholics, or the feast of Bairam to the Moslems. Moreover, in such a country as the elevated regions of the Sierras, it was absolutely imperative that the grain should be sown simultaneously, and at this one season. If not, the next year the Children of the Sun would have to fight a foe even more pitiless than the Spaniards, for there would be famine throughout the length and breadth of the land. There were thus two reasons--one religious and one economical--which made it imperative to partially raise the siege of Cuzco, at least for a time. Now that the great Temple of the Sun had been defiled and desecrated, the most holy place in the Land of the Four Regions was the temple on the sacred Island of Titicaca, some six days’ journey to the south, and thither it was necessary that the Inca, in his sacred character as Brother of the Sun, should go and open the first furrow with his golden hoe and plant the first seeds of the next year’s harvest. To have neglected this duty would have been an incredible impiety, and a breach of a custom hallowed by ages of solemn observance. On the other hand, too, the multitudes which had been gathered about Cuzco, feeling the pinch of famine, and wearying of the length and rigours of the siege, were getting more and more difficult to keep together in any semblance of an army. Their thoughts were turning to their homes and families, and to the starvation and misery that would be their fate if the crops were not sown. The last grand attack on the Spanish camp had failed, as all the others had done, and the disheartened hosts of the Inca were falling back to their old belief that, after all, these strange invaders must be something more than human, and therefore unconquerable, and Manco and his old General well knew that, while the people were in this temper, to neglect or even to postpone the Feast of Sowing would be to provoke almost universal mutiny and revolt, and utterly ruin all hope of future resistance.