As he said this he pointed with his right hand downward towards a tumbling sea of frozen mist which rolled in ghostly, silent billows along the mountain-side, and even as he spoke a storm-gust swept down from the upper ridges and rent asunder the heavy snow-laden clouds above them. Through this the sun, already beginning to sink towards the west, shone with a sudden stream of warmth and radiance. The mists at their feet parted, and through the changing rifts their longing eyes caught distant glimpses of tree-clad slopes and level, verdant plains cut by shining streams far, far away below them, and in the midst, for one brief instant, they saw a city so far away that it looked like a home of pigmies, yet with a gleam as of gold on its domes and roofs.
“Cajamarca! Cajamarca! Yonder is the Inca’s city!” piped Filipillo in his thin, shrill voice, starting forward and pointing down towards it.
“El-Dorado! El-Dorado!” shouted Carvahal in a hoarse, cracked voice, scrambling back into his saddle. “Santiago! we have won our way through this frozen hell. Now let us get down to Paradise, since in this heathen country God’s order is changed and Hell stands above Heaven.”
“El-Dorado! El-Dorado!” ran like an echo from lip to lip—and, as the whole troop moved forward and downward, the rifts in the snow-mist closed again and shut out the vision from their eyes.
CHAPTER V.
THE OPEN GATE
It was a good hour or more, so steep and difficult is that downward road, before the zone of frozen mist was passed through, and the vanguard of the little army halted, transfixed with wonder and admiration by the glorious scene which spread out—looking, in good truth, like a vision of Paradise after the hideous regions they had just passed through—some five thousand feet below them.
To the north-westward the slanting beams of the descending sun streamed under the edge of the cloud and mist and spread in a flood of glory over a broad valley walled in by terraced hills on every side. The whole of the level floor of the valley was covered with fields and plantations, separated by long green and red flowering hedges, groves of trees and shining streams, and straight paved roads, bordered by over-hanging trees.
At the very foot, as it seemed from that elevation, of the steep, sloping mountain-wall they had just crossed lay the city of Cajamarca, and scattered all over the valley were scores of villages gleaming white amidst the green of the fields and leafy groves about them.
On the lower slopes of the hills rose countless terraces, formed by the patient labour of many generations, the lowest of them golden with ripened maize, and step by step the gold passed shade by shade into the brilliant green of the unripened crops of the highest terraces. It was a vast oasis in the midst of a still vaster chaos of bleak and desert mountains, the home, as it seemed to these wayworn travellers, of industrious peace and bounteous plenty, and the gentler soul of Alonso de Molina whispered to him as his gaze first fell upon its glories that it was a paradise into which he and his gold-hungering companions were about to bring the poison of treachery and the storms of ruthless violence.
And yet another moment’s thought reminded him that not even this fair-seeming Eden was free from the curse that had blasted the first Paradise of earth, for he knew well that in the midst of it lay encamped a vast and conquering host, led by one who, beguiled by the fleeting dream of empire, had drawn his sword against his brother and brought down upon the ancient empire of the Incas that doom pronounced of old against the kingdom divided against itself—the doom which by the mailed hand of the invader was so soon to fall upon himself.