Slowly the haze grew deeper and redder, and as it grew the sun seemed to shrink until they could see it shining dully as through a mist of blood, scarce larger than the moon. Then the spell of silence was broken again, and a long, low, shuddering wail went murmuring round the square. But soon above it rose the sharp shrieks and shrill screams of women and children.
Soldiers flung down their arms and broke their ranks unreproved by their officers. Some grovelled on the ground, hiding their faces in their hands, and some ran about waving their arms and wailing like children or shrieking out incoherent words. Even the Inca had forgotten alike his majesty and his vengeance in the universal terror, and sat upon his golden throne, clutching with shaking hands at the arms and staring up with eyes that seemed about to burst from their sockets, and at his feet his queen-mother cowered, shuddering and moaning and covering her face with her cloak, not daring to look up.
A black shape, blacker than starless night, was beginning to creep across the sun’s rim, growing slowly broader and broader, and then, though it was scarcely an hour past midday, a darkness as of sudden midnight began to fall upon the valley, and here and there stars began to flicker palely in the sky as the black shape ate its way into the dimmed brightness of the fading sun.
And now there was not a sound in all the swarming, fear-stricken city as, right over the visible face of their God, the Children of the Sun watched that incarnate Blackness creep, until at last, in the very height and majesty of its noonday pride, it was blotted out from their sight. Then, from behind the blackness, there leapt out lurid flaming shapes of ghastly splendour, blue and red and yellow—the last flickerings, as they thought, of their dying God’s expiring glory.
But this was only the beginning of the terrors of that awful noontide, for as they watched the hideous disc of flame-encircled darkness a roar as of a thousand thunder-peals in one shook the firmament and seemed to bring its ruins crushing down upon the shuddering earth. Then out of the north-west there leapt up a vast sheet of glaring ruddy light, and against it they saw the shape of Yavirá, crowned by the altar of the Unknown God, stand out huge and black and sharp.
A fiery wind like a blast from the very mouth of Hell itself swept roaring through the valley, and, as though swiftly drawn out by invisible hands, a black curtain spread over the heavens from north to south and east to west, and under it the ever-broadening glare blazed out, swiftly changing it from black to red. The earth reeled and swayed beneath their feet: the stone-paved streets cracked and gaped, and the mighty walls of palace and temple, built to endure for ever, shook and split, and great stones came crashing down, crushing scores out of all human shape beneath them.
And now the spell of fear was broken and the bonds of horror loosed, and madness came. Those who had moaned and wailed before now laughed and sang and shouted, and at the sound Manco woke from his stupor.
All this time he had stood with Nahua in his arms and the knife ready poised above her breast. Both seemed as though the fearful magic of the sights and sounds about them had changed them to statues of bronze, paralysed alike in mind and body.
When her father and mother fell dead beside her a shudder had run through Nahua’s body and then it had become fixed and rigid, and she had stood staring at the dead with blank, unmeaning eyes, heedless of the horror that was in Heaven and the terror that was on the earth.
Manco too, though half-prepared by his vigil on the altar and the words of Mama-Lupa for what had come to pass, had been smitten with a thought at once terrible and glad, the thought that in another moment Nahua would have died by his hand, and this had seemed to turn his heart and brain to stone and his blood to ice.