General del Valle was upwards of seventy years of age, and, unable longer to endure the excessive cold of the mountains, he descended into the valley of the Vilcamayu, and captured Quiquijana, hanging the Cacique Luis Poma Inca, who defended it. On the 6th of April the Spanish army advanced up the valley, meeting with considerable opposition, and reached Checacupe early in the day. Near this village the Inca had taken up a position, defended by a ditch and parapet stretching across the valley, and manned by 20,000 men, but he had neglected to provide any defence for his flanks. A Spanish division stole unperceived to the back of the position, while the main body assaulted it in front; and after an heroic defence the Indians, attacked both in front and rear, fell back to another entrenched position at Combapata, a league from Tinta, where the village was surrounded by a mud wall, covered at the top with thorny bushes. The Spaniards, following up their success, played upon the village with their field-pieces for several hours, then carried the position at the point of the bayonet, and made a bloody entry into Tinta. Tupac Amaru, with his wife and three sons, fled to Lanqui, a village about twenty miles to the westward, on the shores of a wild Alpine lake. Here he intended to have rallied his disordered troops, but he was betrayed by one of his own officers, named Ventura Landaeta, who, assisted by the cura of the place, basely delivered the illustrious Inca and his family into the hands of the Spaniards. On the same day General del Valle hung sixty-seven Indian prisoners at Tinta, whose heads he stuck on poles by the road-side.[228] Diego Tupac Amaru, his nephew Andres Mendagure, and Mariano, the second son of the Inca, fortunately escaped. On the 8th of April Francisco, the aged uncle of the Inca,[229] was also seized, and the prisoners were marched bareheaded into Cuzco, the visitador Areche coming out as far as Urcos to meet them. They were all separated from each other, and told that they would not meet again until the day of execution. The chief prisoners were the Inca Tupac Amaru, his wife, his two sons Hipolito and Fernando, his uncle Francisco, his brother-in-law Antonio Bastidas, his maternal cousin Patricio Noguera, his cousin Cecilia Tupac Amaru with her husband Pedro Mendagure, a number of captains in the Inca's army and other officials, and Aliaga's executioner named Antonio Oblitas,[230] a negro slave.