On the western side of the plaza there was a high wall of mud and stone stretching between two buildings some two hundred paces apart, and against this was pressed a vast throng of panting, struggling wretches, hemmed in on all sides by the Spanish horse and foot. The bullets tore their way through the dense mass, the stamping horse-hoofs struck them down by dozens, and the sweeping, thrusting steel mowed them down by scores. At length the vast throng surged outwards for a moment, and then, like a wave beaten back by the rocks, recoiled upon the wall. For one awful moment it remained motionless, pent in between the closing ring of steel and the wall. Then the wall swayed and tottered, and with a rumbling crash fell outwards, and over its ruins and through the cloud of dust that rose over them the wave of human agony and terror surged forward and scattered into broken and flying units over the open field beyond. Some of the cavalry, foremost among whom was old Carvahal, his broad face purple-red with the lust of slaughter, rolling to and fro in his saddle, shouting hoarse battle-cries and invoking every saint in the calendar as he laid about him to right and left with his long sword, spurred forward over the ruins of the wall and spread out over the plain, careering hither and thither, and trampling and cutting their screaming victims down; but the greater part turned back to take their share in the still more bloody work that was going on round the gorgeous litter of the Inca. This was now tossing to and fro above the human flood like a boat labouring in the sea, and in it Atahuallpa sat clinging to his golden chair, staring with dazed eyes at the hideous scene about him, thinking, it may be, of that other scene in far-off Quito, and remembering those last words of Mama-Lupa as she stood above the prostrate body of Zaïma, his mother, on the terrace-- “Sacrifice! Sacrifice! The Divine Ones are wroth, and only sacrifice can appease them!” And sacrifice it truly was, such sacrifice as human ruthlessness has seldom exacted or human loyalty and devotion paid. The nobles and princes of the doomed empire, their trappings of gold and silver and gems splashed and spattered with the noblest blood in the Land of the Four Regions, crowded round the litter of their Lord, opposing their bare hands to the steel of the Spaniards, and making a wall of their bodies to protect him from the plunging, trampling chargers. They clung with despairing heroism to manes and bridles, they strove to drag the riders from their saddles, and even flung their arms round the horses’ legs, as though with their puny strength they would wrestle with these strange and terrible war-beasts and overthrow them. No sooner did one go down trampled to death or cloven to the chin than another sprang forward to take his place and meet his doom.