In the cold, clear dawn of the morning after the Day of Terrors, Manco stood with Nahua in the doorway of a tambo, or rest-house, some five leagues to the south of Quito, on the great road that ran between the Sierras to Cuzco. They two alone of all the threescore victims who had stood together on the scaffold had escaped through the miracle or the mercy of the fate which had decreed for them the strange destiny of which the pages that follow will tell. They were facing the eastern mountains, and their eager eyes were shining in the silver light of the fast brightening dawn. Soon long shafts of rosy light shot up from behind the clear-cut mountain-tops, and the morning star grew paler in the midst of their radiance. A broad band of ruddy golden light outspread across the sky behind the peaks and snowfields which gleamed and glittered in the glory it shed upon them, and then, in the eternal splendour of his unclouded majesty, the great sun rose up to smile once more upon the world. Instantly Manco and Nahua bowed themselves in glad adoration before it. Then Manco took Nahua in his arms and said-- “Our Father’s wrath is past, my Nahua, and the wrath of the Divine Ones is appeased! See, his face shines as brightly as ever upon his children. He has given us his blessing again as he has done every morning that we have lived. Now let us go, and I will take you to my home, and you shall see the true City of the Sun.” Then, hand in hand, they went on their way towards the South, leaving the darkened North where the doomed city still lay under its pall of mingled fire and darkness, behind them. BOOK II CHAPTER I. ON THE ROAD TO EL-DORADO In the late afternoon of a day towards the end of October, in the year 1532, a little company of horse and foot, attended by some twoscore Indian bearers, was plodding slowly and wearily towards the green margin of a thirsty wilderness of red-brown sand and rock, over which it had been toiling almost without rest for sixteen hours past. Nearly seventy of the company were either mounted or walking beside their parched and weary horses, and four of the strange animals, never before seen in the unknown regions into which the little army was penetrating, were harnessed to wheeled gun-carriages, on each of which was mounted a petrero, or small brass cannon, capable of throwing a ball of about three pounds weight. Besides the seventy horsemen, there were about a hundred men-at-arms, all passably equipped with helmet, breast-plate, and back-piece, sword and dagger and pike, and of these three carried arquebuses and resting-forks, and some twenty of them arbalests, or heavy cross-bows, which at fifty paces would send their short, steel-headed bolts through breast and back of a mailed warrior.