As they moved in the midst of their captors down the sloping meadow to the shore of the great lake, sparkling and calm under the mid-morning sun, these stories were quickly told. At the shore, the Incas embarked in several great canoes holding a score of men each. The prisoners, however, were placed aboard a state barge in which Prince Huaca also embarked. The barge rowed forty oars, twenty to a side.
Paddles dipped in unison, and the canoes were off. The oars of the great barge flashed in and out in perfect time, and it, too, moved away in stately fashion, with the prisoners left to themselves on the half-deck at the bow, while Prince Huaca took his post on the other half-deck at the stern. The rowers could be seen bending back and forth, back muscles rippling under their tunics, in the waist of the barge.
“Am I dreaming?” said Frank.
Mr. Hampton nodded.
“It is hard to believe, isn’t it, Frank?”
“Hard? It’s impossible to believe. Why, this is like stepping back thousands of years to the shores of the Mediterranean and the Greek galleys of the days before Christ.”
“These fellows seem like Greeks or Romans, too,” mused Mr. Hampton. “The commoners, with their bobbed hair, their tunics and sandals, and Prince Huaca, proud and stately as a Roman noble, are not exactly what one would expect to find in the world of today.”
Don Ernesto agreed. The remark opened another line of thought.
“See how openly they operate on this lake, and in this valley,” he said. “Look around you, too. So far as I can observe, there is only the one entrance of the pass through which we were brought. Can it be that the Incas maintain frontier guards, so to speak, on perpetual watch to capture any intruders into this wild region who threaten discovery of their secret? I begin to believe so. Perhaps guards are on duty on the mountain tops about us, and others in the valley beyond the pass.”
This, they later learned, was the actual state of affairs. Not only were frontier guards kept on constant duty about the great valley in which they now found themselves, but also about the inner valley holding the Enchanted City, to which they were being taken. Moreover, such watch had been maintained down the centuries.