The hardihood and agility displayed by José during the journey surprised Fray Fernando. He made very little of the wound he had received from Pepe, though it was severe enough to have laid a European aside for weeks. But this was thoroughly Indian. No amount of walking or running seemed to fatigue him. Fray Fernando was by no means a match for him, and was always the first to propose a halt. José, compassionating his weakness, would frequently offer him some of his favourite coca, but this the monk always declined, from an unaccountable idea taken up by the Spaniards, that the use of the harmless stimulant was in some way connected with the superstition of the Indians. From the extreme of supposing his pupil a child, whose simple thoughts he could read like an open book, Fray Fernando passed into the opposite one, of considering him a hopeless enigma. And, indeed, José, or rather, as the Spaniards would have called him—for they conceded the honours of nobility to the Children of the Sun—Don José Viracocha Inca, was a compound of so many heterogenous elements, that his character might well be a perplexity. He was an American Indian, with nearly all the peculiarities that distinguish the aborigines of the New World from the natives of the Old fully and clearly developed. But races flower as well as plants. The flower of the American race—and a strange, rare flower it was—was surely that mysterious family, the self-styled Children of the Sun. Their origin continues wrapt in obscurity, but their moral and intellectual ascendancy has been written on the page of history, in the peace, the order, and the prosperity they secured to millions of their fellow-men. José was an Inca, and heir not only to the very peculiar character, but to the traditions of the sons of Manco Capac. But upon these had been grafted seven years of careful training in the white man’s thoughts and habits, as well as in the white man’s learning and religion. And, moreover, there was that within him for which neither race, education, nor training could fully account. Had he lived fifty years earlier, he would have been the foremost “haravec”[23] at the court of his great kinsman, Huayna Capac. He would have made sweet “yaravis”[24] for the Indian girls to sing, and more ambitious dramas to be acted before the Inca and his court. But the faculties which would then have found expression in song had now no exercise, save in the ever-recurring wail over those former days, which indeed were better than these. This preponderance of imagination in his character was the real cause of his temporary repudiation of Christianity (or rather Catholicism), and return to the faith of his fathers. But such a return could be only temporary, if indeed it was more than fancied. What Huayna Capac, on whom no gleam of the light of revelation ever shone, had been taught by the light of reason to abandon, could scarcely be held seriously by a youth instructed as José had been.