Chapter Eleven.
The City of the Sun.
On the afternoon of the fourth day following Tiahuana’s departure, about an hour before sunset, as Escombe was about to enter the house after a somewhat longer walk than usual in the valley, he paused for a moment at the head of the footpath to take a last, long look at the lovely landscape, with the leading features of which he was now becoming tolerably familiar, when his wandering gaze was arrested by the glint of the sunlight upon what had the appearance of a number of rapidly moving objects indistinctly seen about a mile distant among the low spreading branches of the trees which lined the great road leading from the City of the Sun.
“Hillo, Arima,” he said to the Indian who was his sole attendant, “who comes here? Are they soldiers? Do you see that flash and glitter yonder among the trees? To me it has the appearance of sun-glint upon spear points and military accoutrements.”
Arima looked for a moment, and then replied:
“Without question it is so, Lord. Doubtless it is Tiahuana returning with the bodyguard which is to escort my Lord the Inca on the occasion of his triumphal entry into the City of the Sun.”
“But those fellows are surely mounted, Arima!” said Escombe. “The movement is that of cavalry; and—listen!—unless I am greatly mistaken, I can hear the clatter of hoofs on the stone pavement of the road.”
“It is even so, Lord,” answered the Indian. “The bodyguard of my Lord the Inca consists of a thousand picked men, mounted on the finest horses that it is possible to breed in the valley.”
“But I have always understood,” said Harry, “that you Peruvians did not believe in mounted men, and that it was, in fact, as much due to your terror of the mounted Spaniards as anything else that you were vanquished in the old days. But I am forgetting; you knew nothing of horses then, did you?”