Chapter XL: Epilogue

It is one of the misfortunes of the romancer who devotes himself to the re-telling of a story which has already been recorded by the pen of History that he cannot deal with his characters as he would with those who are purely the creation of his own fancy. Here or there a date or an incident may be altered, and to a certain extent he may put such words as he pleases into the mouths of those whom he has recalled from the grave to play their parts upon the stage which he has reconstructed for them. But with this the license which he may legitimately use is exhausted. To push his privileges beyond this point would be to utterly destroy the verisimilitude of his narrative by bringing it into flat contradiction with the known facts of history.

Thus I am well aware that in the present instance the unities of Romance would demand that not Ruminavi, but Manco-Capac, should have died that gallant death on the citadel of the Sacsahuaman, or, better still, have brought back a great host with him from the South and overwhelmed his conquerors in the hour of their victory. But the circumstances narrated by the chroniclers of the Conquest, some of whom were actually present, are substantially as they have been given here. The gallant Manco was far away when the last assault was made, although even had he been present the final result, although it might have been deferred, could hardly have been different in the end. And yet as it happens it is this very fact which makes it possible for the romancer to bring the tale of the Conquest of Peru to a close with at least a plausible assumption that in the end poetic justice was done.

With the fall of the Sacsahuaman the Siege of Cuzco virtually ended. It is true that after the seed-time Manco came back and once more encompassed the city with innumerable legions, but meanwhile the Spaniards had stripped the surrounding country bare, not only of the remaining stores of grain, but also of the remnants of the Peruvian flocks and herds. Almagro’s men, too, were marching back from Chile, and reinforcements at length were pushing their way through the mountain defiles from the cities of the coast, and ship-load after ship-load of adventurers from Panama and Nicaragua were landing on the doomed shores of Peru. So in the end the gallant Manco, seeing his legions starving by thousands around him, was forced to yield to famine if not to the Spaniards, and finally raised the siege.

From Cuzco he retired into the fastnesses of Yucay and the impregnable fortress of Ollantay-Tambo. Here expedition after expedition was sent against him, only to be cut off to a man or hurled back in defeat and disaster. Then the well-earned vengeance of Eternal Justice fell hard and heavy on those iron Conquerors who for lust of riches had outraged every canon of human and Divine law. The gold that they came to seek proved their ruin when they had found it. Faction turned against faction, and comrade against comrade, and fiercer fights by far were fought between Spaniard and Spaniard than had ever been fought between Spaniard and Peruvian, and to-day there is not a rood of ground on all the South American continent over which the golden banner of Spain flies.

Of those of the Conquerors who have figured in these pages only one reaped any earthly reward for his labours, and this was the gallant and gentle knight Hernando de Soto, who, after the Civil Wars married a noble Inca princess, whom he took with him as his bride to Spain and presented at the Court of the Great Emperor. Of the rest, Alonso de Molina, as we have seen, died with his head on the breast of his well-beloved enemy and rival in love. Juan Pizarro died a soldier’s death on the citadel of the Sacsahuaman. His brother Gonzalo, taken in revolt against his lawful sovereign, lost his head on the block. Carvahal, after winning himself the title of “the Demon of the Andes,” was dragged to the scaffold in a basket and there hung, drawn, and quartered under the sentence of the victorious Viceroy. Pedro de Candia was murdered on the bloody field of Chupas by Almagro his own commander, and Almagro himself, taken prisoner in Cuzco by Don Hernando, was garroted in prison after abjectly begging his life from his conqueror. And Don Hernando himself went home to Spain only to be flung into a dungeon, in which he languished for twenty weary years--the last of his ever-famous family--to be released in the evening of his days, and to watch from the sad eminence of a hundred years of life the ruin of the great enterprise in which he had borne so conspicuous and, on the whole, so honourable a part.

Of the fate of Manco there are two stories told. One by the Spaniards, which says, that after years of successful guerrilla warfare, during which he made his name a terror to the conquerors of his country, he fell slain, surrounded by the bodies of his enemies, in an obscure combat. The other, be it legend or truth as you will, is found in the traditions of the fallen people, who still revere his name as that of the last champion of their lost liberties.

In an unknown and almost inaccessible valley hidden away somewhere in the vast ranges of the Vilcañota, surrounded by ice-crowned peaks and vast snowfields towering far up into the cloudless sky, he at length, with a remnant of the Children of the Blood, found a refuge, and there to this day the ancient Inca Empire survives, awaiting the day of vengeance, and ruled over by a lineal descendant of the last bearer of the Divine Name, and of her who was once the fairest and noblest of the Virgins of the Sun.

In this happy uncertainty we may take farewell of Manco and Nahua, and turn our eyes for a moment to the City of the Kings. There, in a room in his own palace, lies an old battle and travel-worn man of nearly three-score years and ten, pierced by the swords of those to whom he had opened the long-locked gates of El-Dorado. His life-blood is dripping from a wound in his throat on to the floor. He turns over on his side and with his finger traces a cross in his own blood. Then he kisses it, and, as his trembling lips shape the one word “Jesu,” another sword pierces him, this time to the heart, and his head drops down and he dies. And this is the end of that iron-souled Conqueror who had fought so many a bitter battle with Destiny and who, with the sword that was to win an empire for others, had traced that Line of Fate on the desolate sands of Gallo.

THE END

ENDNOTES

[1] _Tavantinsuyu_] “The Land of the Four Regions” (North, South, East, and West). The name Peru was not known to the Incas. It was an invention of the Spaniards, and of obscure, indeed, unknown origin.

[2] _the doom of those who disobey_] All disobedience to the direct commands of the reigning Inca was punished by death because he was considered to be the incarnation of Divinity; hence disobedience to him was sacrilege. There is, however, no instance on record of this crime having been committed.

[3] Nothing less than this appalling penalty was the punishment decreed by the Inca laws to those who disobeyed the commands or deliberately thwarted the will of the crowned Son of the Sun.

[4] _by the coming of our Father_] The rising of the sun was thus alluded to.

[5] _Coya_] Queen, or wife-royal, as distinguished from those who formed the harem of the Sovereign. The Incas held exactly the same views on the subject of sister-marriage as the Pharaohs did.

[6] _the brilliant Chasca_] The Incas’ name for the planet Venus. They called her in their poems “the bright-haired handmaid of the Sun.”

[7] _the yellow fringe on his brow_] The mark of social differences. Those not of the pure Inca race wore black, those of the blood-royal yellow, and the crowned Inca scarlet mingled with gold threads.

[8] This portent was actually seen over the city of Cuzco shortly before the Conquest.

[9] _Llapa_] A generic term used by the Incas to denote all or any of the manifestations of thunder-storms, earthquakes, meteors, and similar phenomena.

[10] _The golden mask shall never cover thy face_] The faces of the royal mummies were covered with a golden mask moulded to the features.

[11] It is said that more than 700 members of Huayna-Capac’s Household sacrificed themselves in various places on his death, but some authorities hold that this savage custom had been abolished by the later and more enlightened Incas.

[12] It was said that nearly 40,000 inhabitants of the Valley of Quito perished in the earthquake which occurred about this time. It is, of course, a matter of history that Atahuallpa escaped.

[13] According to one who took some share in this hideous day’s work, this was absolutely the only wound inflicted on a Spaniard.

[14] The Spanish chroniclers have recorded that Atahuallpa felt the, to him, unspeakable dishonour of this proposal even more keenly than his own captivity and all the indignities that it entailed.

[15] _roaring torrent of the “Great Speaker”_] The Apu-Rimac, one of the head-waters of the Amazon. It flows through this gorge with a constant dull roar.

[16] _I baptize thee, Juan de Atahuallpa_] It was the evening of the Feast of St. John. Hence the new “convert’s” name.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Frontispiece by Stanley L. Wood.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ conquerers/conquerors, spearmen/spear-men, war-beasts/war beasts, etc.) have been preserved.

Plain text edition only: note markers are given in [square] brackets.

Alterations to the text:

Convert footnotes to endnotes.

Punctuation: fix a few quotation mark pairings and a missing period.

[Book I/Chapter III]

Change “and he looked up to see what new _horrow_ was coming” to _horror_.

[Book I/Chapter IV]

“A _wierd_, low sound of song seemed to rise from” to _weird_.

[Book I/Chapter V]

“Yet not a _murmer_ of pity or sorrow came from a single” to _murmur_.

“from a single breast in all the vast, silent, throng” delete comma after _silent_.

“Manco replied in a low, steady _vaice_” to _voice_.

[Book I/Chapter VI]

“the last of them had died away in a long, wailing, scream.” delete the comma after _wailing_.

[Book II/Chapter I]

“than when we started. _and_ as for that green yonder” to _And_.

“Atahuallpa, by all accounts, is a base-born _ursurper_ and ruthless” to _usurper_.

[Book II/Chapter IV]

“I feel as though I were hanging _‘twixt_ Heaven and earth” to _’twixt_.

[Book II/Chapter V]

“_Cajarmarca_ was, for the time being, a city of the dead” to _Cajamarca_.

[Book IV/Chapter VI]

“We rode on, hoping to gain some _knowlege_ of the position” to _knowledge_.

“exchange for those of his mother and and his betrothed” delete one _and_.

[Book IV/Chapter XII]

“the Spanish long-bows and _arbalasts_ were almost as deadly” to _arbalests_.

[End of text]