It is one of the misfortunes of the romancer who devotes himself to the re-telling of a story which has already been recorded by the pen of History that he cannot deal with his characters as he would with those who are purely the creation of his own fancy. Here or there a date or an incident may be altered, and to a certain extent he may put such words as he pleases into the mouths of those whom he has recalled from the grave to play their parts upon the stage which he has reconstructed for them. But with this the license which he may legitimately use is exhausted. To push his privileges beyond this point would be to utterly destroy the verisimilitude of his narrative by bringing it into flat contradiction with the known facts of history. Thus I am well aware that in the present instance the unities of Romance would demand that not Ruminavi, but Manco-Capac, should have died that gallant death on the citadel of the Sacsahuaman, or, better still, have brought back a great host with him from the South and overwhelmed his conquerors in the hour of their victory. But the circumstances narrated by the chroniclers of the Conquest, some of whom were actually present, are substantially as they have been given here. The gallant Manco was far away when the last assault was made, although even had he been present the final result, although it might have been deferred, could hardly have been different in the end. And yet as it happens it is this very fact which makes it possible for the romancer to bring the tale of the Conquest of Peru to a close with at least a plausible assumption that in the end poetic justice was done. With the fall of the Sacsahuaman the Siege of Cuzco virtually ended. It is true that after the seed-time Manco came back and once more encompassed the city with innumerable legions, but meanwhile the Spaniards had stripped the surrounding country bare, not only of the remaining stores of grain, but also of the remnants of the Peruvian flocks and herds. Almagro’s men, too, were marching back from Chile, and reinforcements at length were pushing their way through the mountain defiles from the cities of the coast, and ship-load after ship-load of adventurers from Panama and Nicaragua were landing on the doomed shores of Peru. So in the end the gallant Manco, seeing his legions starving by thousands around him, was forced to yield to famine if not to the Spaniards, and finally raised the siege.