The virgin of the sun

by George Chetwynd Griffith

Zaïma heard her and sprang to her feet, her fears banished by this nearer danger. But before she could turn to fly a score of eager, pitiless hands were clutching at her limbs and garments, and a score of screaming voices were crying—

“Come with us, Coya, come! We dare not go to our Lord without thee.”

She grasped one of the arms of the golden throne and clung to it, crying to her son to save her. But the Inca sat still, staring straight before him and seeing nothing, like one in a waking dream, and not seeming even to hear her prayer. So they dragged her away, screaming and chanting salutations to their Lord, and with her in their midst they ran across the square, now almost bare of people, for with one consent nearly all the throng had made for the outlets and were swarming into the narrow streets, strangling and trampling each other down between the rocking and gaping walls.

Some of the women who had gone first to the scaffold had picked up the smouldering torches, and, waving them swiftly in the air, had made them burst into flame again. Then, with Zaïma still struggling and shrieking in their midst, the others mounted the platform over the fagots, and then those with the torches followed and danced round them, while all but Zaïma chanted the Death-Song. When it was done they flung their torches in among the fagots, and as the wall of flame and smoke rose up around them they flung their arms about each other, calling upon their Lord to witness their faith and fondness, and so they went to bear him company in the land where there is no death, leaving the fire-smitten and shuddering earth behind them.^[11]

But all the while the terrors of the earthquake were multiplying throughout the valley of the doomed city. Mighty masses of red-hot rock were flung high into the air from the throat of the volcano and fell back to earth, some on the mountain-sides and some on the squares and streets and buildings of the city, bursting in the midst of close-packed masses of men and women and children. Great gaps were opening in the ground and closing again, swallowing fragments of walls and buildings and burying hundreds alive in their depths. But the new-crowned Inca sat still and unharmed upon his throne, for at length his terror had passed, lost in a cold despair, and he had resolved to die, if die he must, crowned and throned as became a king and the son of kings, and so, in the midst of the ruins of his city and the death-agonies of his people, he remained to the last, the one being unmoved, watching the blazing pyre and waiting for the hand of death to strike him.^[12]

In the cold, clear dawn of the morning after the Day of Terrors, Manco stood with Nahua in the doorway of a tambo, or rest-house, some five leagues to the south of Quito, on the great road that ran between the Sierras to Cuzco. They two alone of all the threescore victims who had stood together on the scaffold had escaped through the miracle or the mercy of the fate which had decreed for them the strange destiny of which the pages that follow will tell.

They were facing the eastern mountains, and their eager eyes were shining in the silver light of the fast brightening dawn. Soon long shafts of rosy light shot up from behind the clear-cut mountain-tops, and the morning star grew paler in the midst of their radiance. A broad band of ruddy golden light outspread across the sky behind the peaks and snowfields which gleamed and glittered in the glory it shed upon them, and then, in the eternal splendour of his unclouded majesty, the great sun rose up to smile once more upon the world.

Instantly Manco and Nahua bowed themselves in glad adoration before it. Then Manco took Nahua in his arms and said—

“Our Father’s wrath is past, my Nahua, and the wrath of the Divine Ones is appeased! See, his face shines as brightly as ever upon his children. He has given us his blessing again as he has done every morning that we have lived. Now let us go, and I will take you to my home, and you shall see the true City of the Sun.”

Then, hand in hand, they went on their way towards the South, leaving the darkened North where the doomed city still lay under its pall of mingled fire and darkness, behind them.