“How now!” exclaimed de Soto, leaping to his feet and looking about him. “Ah! madre de Dios! was ever such a sight seen in the world before?”
“By Allah!—that is, I should say, all the Saints!” said ben-Alcazar, coming to his side. “It might be one of the valleys of Paradise itself. Are the wonders of this land never to cease for us? I, for one, am beginning to doubt whether I am still on earth.”
“This, then,” said de Molina, ranging his eyes over the vast and lovely prospect before them, and drawing in a deep breath of the keen, fresh morning air—“this can be nothing else than Cuzco itself, the City of the Sun!”
“Ay, that is so, comrade,” said de Candia; “and look you, yonder comes the Sun himself to show us his royal city in all its splendour.”
As he spoke the swiftly rising sun blazed out suddenly over the peaks of the huge mountain wall that stretched along to the eastward of the valley, and in an instant earth and sky were blazing with light. All their retinue faced with one movement to the east, and, spreading their arms wide apart, gazed upward for a moment with raptured eyes and then bowed low in worship of the rising symbol of their Father and their God, and in the midst of them the four Christians stood erect, gazing in speechless wonder at the glory of the scene spread out below them, and looking, for the first time Christian eyes had ever looked, upon the visible and splendid reality of the long-sought, long-dreamed of El-Dorado, the Place of Gold.
CHAPTER VI.
THE RETURN OF MANCO
At the moment when the Spanish cavaliers arrived on the brow of the hill overlooking Cuzco, Manco-Capac was walking with Nahua up and down a broad, paved path in a vast garden which formed part of the precincts of the great Temple of the Sun. It was one of the most wonderful gardens in the world, unequalled even by those lying round the Temple on the Island of Titicaca, or by the marvellous gardens attached to the pleasure palaces of the Incas in the valley of Yucay, “the Vale of Imperial Delights.”
It was oblong in form and of considerable extent, containing some three acres by English measurement. The high walls of smooth, dressed stone were half pierced by deep niches or alcoves lined with plates of alternate gold and silver, and converted into shady bowers by veils of creeping plants suspended on trelliswork of silver.
The centre of the garden was laid out in exact imitation of the city, that is to say, each straight street was represented by walks which crossed each other, as the streets did, at right angles, and the squares and fountains were all reproduced exactly in miniature. The flower-beds were brilliant with many-tinted blossoms and odorous with a hundred perfumes. Every flowering plant that would come to maturity in the valley was represented, and those of the warmer valleys at lower elevations were cunningly counterfeited in gold and silver and copper coloured so as to exactly imitate stalks and leaves and blossoms.
They had just met, Manco coming from the garden entrance of the Temple, and Nahua from the gateway opening out of a long passage leading from the House of the Virgins of the Sun. The five years that had passed since their escape from the City of the Great Ravine had changed them from a boy and girl to a youth and maiden on the threshold of manhood and womanhood. Nahua was now nearly sixteen and Manco within a few months of twenty.