But before a torch touched the fagots a great screaming cry of almost more than mortal terror rang out from thousands of throats at once, and tens of thousands of hands went up, pointing to the sun. The torch-men looked up too and stood transfixed with terror, their torches dropping from their trembling hands, for Mama-Lupa’s terrible words were coming true. A blood-red haze was stealing across the face of the sun sailing unclouded in the zenith. In the whole heavens there was neither cloud nor mist, but as the bloody haze deepened all the sky grew dim at once, and its azure turned to dusky grey. From Atahuallpa on his throne to the destined victims of his unrighteous vengeance on the scaffold utter terror held every heart still and frozen in its icy grip. CHAPTER VII. THE KINDLING OF THE PYRE When the sound of the first myriad-voiced cry had died away the spell of a great silence fell upon the multitude. The torches smoked and smouldered out harmlessly on the ground, and they whose nerveless hands had dropped them stood like the rest, gazing upwards with fixed eyes, forgetful of all else but the awful portent in the sky. Slowly the haze grew deeper and redder, and as it grew the sun seemed to shrink until they could see it shining dully as through a mist of blood, scarce larger than the moon. Then the spell of silence was broken again, and a long, low, shuddering wail went murmuring round the square. But soon above it rose the sharp shrieks and shrill screams of women and children. Soldiers flung down their arms and broke their ranks unreproved by their officers. Some grovelled on the ground, hiding their faces in their hands, and some ran about waving their arms and wailing like children or shrieking out incoherent words. Even the Inca had forgotten alike his majesty and his vengeance in the universal terror, and sat upon his golden throne, clutching with shaking hands at the arms and staring up with eyes that seemed about to burst from their sockets, and at his feet his queen-mother cowered, shuddering and moaning and covering her face with her cloak, not daring to look up. A black shape, blacker than starless night, was beginning to creep across the sun’s rim, growing slowly broader and broader, and then, though it was scarcely an hour past midday, a darkness as of sudden midnight began to fall upon the valley, and here and there stars began to flicker palely in the sky as the black shape ate its way into the dimmed brightness of the fading sun. And now there was not a sound in all the swarming, fear-stricken city as, right over the visible face of their God, the Children of the Sun watched that incarnate Blackness creep, until at last, in the very height and majesty of its noonday pride, it was blotted out from their sight. Then, from behind the blackness, there leapt out lurid flaming shapes of ghastly splendour, blue and red and yellow--the last flickerings, as they thought, of their dying God’s expiring glory.