“Sic itur ad astra!” replied ben-Alcazar gravely. “I have heard of a proverb which says that the memory of toil which is past is the best heartening brave men can have to strengthen them for future labours.”
“That is as true as thy scrap of Latin, ben-Alcazar,” laughed de Molina more gaily than he had done; “yet surely we have climbed near enough to the stars in coming here. For my own part I wish to go no nearer till I go for good.”
“We are ready—Vamos!” cried de Soto before he could get any further with his philosophical speech.
As he spoke he drew his sword and at the same moment the trumpet sounded, and at the head of their little troop of fifteen horse, the pick and flower of the whole army so far as mounting and accoutrements went, they moved across the square towards the opening of the street which led to the roadway running from the city walls to the pleasure-house round which the army of the Inca lay encamped.
This, when they came upon it, they found to be such a roadway as they had not so far met with in Peru, and forming a most pleasant contrast to the mountain paths over which they had so lately toiled. It was broad, straight, level, and well paved with evenly set stones, upon which the hoofs of their iron-shod horses rang merrily as they trotted along it. When they had covered about half of the way and had come within full view of the splendours of the Inca camp, with its thousands of brightly-coloured tents and hundreds of waving standards covering the plain beyond and sloping up the hillside on the other side of the valley, de Soto, turning in the saddle, said to the trumpeter of the troop—
“Diego, fill thy chest and give us a good honest blast so that we may give his heathen High-and-mightiness over yonder some warning of the honour that the servants of his Most Catholic Majesty are about to do him in this visit.”
The trumpeter put the shining brazen tube to his lips and sent the shrill, piercing notes ringing down through the silence of the valley, and as the echoes of the mountain wall repeated them de Soto said again—
“Caballeros, it is long since our good beasts have stretched their limbs on such a road as this, and mine is already pulling at the bridle as though a gallop were well to his taste. Give rein, then, and forward at speed. To come in good style before His Majesty will do us no harm in the eyes of the heathen.”
With that he threw up his right hand and gave his charger the rein. The troop, riding three abreast, followed suit, and with a thunder of hoofs and a rattle and jingle of arms and harness, with the afternoon sun shining brightly on breast-plate and morion, tossing plumes and waving pennon, the Spanish cavalcade swept along the causeway, as the historian of the Conquest has well described it, “like some fearful apparition on the wings of the wind.”
Thus they came into full sight of the Peruvian camp and saw long, serried lines of gaily-dressed warriors, splendid in armour of gold and casques of silver, drawn up motionless and expectant on the farther bank of a broad, shallow stream at which the causeway ended in a bridge of such light structure that it was manifestly made for nothing heavier than foot traffic.