It was midday. Sumac lay sleeping, or seeming to sleep, on a low couch, called a pununa. A favourite attendant sat near, converting a little heap of wool into delicate threads by means of a spindle which she turned with a curiously-carved handle, and looking from time to time, with a mute and wistful sorrow, on the wasted face of her beloved nũsta. It has been said that some women “have no language at all for their profoundest experiences, except to pine away and die.” Of such was Sumac. We have little right to look down from the proud height of our “Aryan” or “Caucasian” superiority upon our dusky brethren and sisters, as though their love and sorrow, compared with ours, “were as moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine.” Well have the race to which Sumac belonged asserted their claim to the love that proves itself stronger than death. Of Sumac’s own kindred was the Inca girl, Manco’s young wife, who endured every torture the Spaniards could invent without groan or murmur, and died at last smiling—because she died for him. Which of us could do more for earthly, not to say for heavenly love? And frail and shadowy as Sumac looked, within her slight frame there dwelt a spirit capable of the same devotion. Viracocha entered the room gently through the open door, opposite to which Sumac’s couch had been placed. He was now dressed in full Inca costume. Above his uncu, with its belt of embroidered cloth, he wore a short mantle of vicuña wool, white and very fine, and adorned with a broad yellow border. On his head was a stately cap or coronal of egret’s feathers, bearing underneath the much-prized sacred cord of yellow and carnation, the insignia of the Children of the Sun. Viracocha was “a very handsome youth, well-shaped, and of a lovely countenance, as were all the other Incas.”[39] His chest was broad, his limbs slight, his head well-formed and graceful, his complexion a comely olive-brown; the oval face smooth as a maiden’s, yet thoroughly manly in expression—the parted lips revealing snow-white teeth—the nose aquiline—the eyes black and piercing, but capable of the tenderest softness—the black hair worn short according to custom, but very abundant and beautifully fine and glossy.