The Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru
George Chetwynd Griffith
9781613106341
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The sun had set over Quito, “the City of the Great Ravine,” but high above the night that had fallen upon the valley rounded tops and pinnacles of rock, gleaming domes of snow and shining minarets of ice were glowing with rosy fires changing every moment the wondrous hues which they borrowed from the light that seemed to stream across them from an unseen source. The unclouded sky was still a fathomless sea of radiance, and, high above all its attendant peaks, the mighty dome of Chimborazo towered up from the gloom into the light, crowned with a canopy of smoke whose rolling clouds seemed like a glorified chaos of light and darkness, of the sombre shadows and brilliant, many-coloured radiance, suspended between heaven and earth. On a couch of the softest textures ever woven by human hands, draped over a framework of precious woods clamped and in a great part overlaid with gold, Huayna-Capac, the last of the long line of Incas descended from the Divine Manco and his sister-wife Mama-Occlu, son and daughter of the Sun, lay dying. The heir of the great Inca Yupanqui, during his long life of unsparing conquest and yet wise and most merciful rule, had extended the empire of the Children of the Sun until, from the burning regions of the North, beyond the central line of the earth, to the arid deserts of the far South, and from the trackless forests of the East to the shores of the Western sea, all the lands and peoples of Tavantinsuyu1 owned, with gladness and without question, the glory of the Rainbow Banner and the just, yet rigid, sway of the Son of the Sun. All that the valour of his soldiers, the wisdom of his councillors, and his own imperial genius could do had been done, and in all the world there was no other empire whose ruler was so completely all-powerful and whose subjects were so peaceful, prosperous, and contented as his were. It was an empire at its zenith. It had reached that acme of military strength and social organisation beyond which, as the history of the world would seem to tell us, the Fates who govern human destiny do not permit a human society to develop. Over an extent of a thousand leagues from north to south, and for four hundred leagues from east to west, in a land which rose from the deserts and torrid valleys of the Pacific coast through infinite gradations of climate to the eternal winter of mountain solitudes soaring far beyond the clouds into the realms of everlasting frost, and from the tropical valleys of the eastern and western slopes where Nature laughed in unrestrained luxuriance to the vast, treeless plains of grass which lay high above the limit of cultivation, walled in by the tremendous rock-ramparts which were crowned with the snowy diadems of the Andes, there was not a man who had need to take thought for the things of to-morrow, not one who did not know that if he fulfilled his duty to the State of which he was a unit, all that he could demand from it would be freely and ungrudgingly granted. There had never been such a society upon earth before, it might be that there would never be such again, and now the work of twenty generations was finished, and the jealous Fates, as though unwilling that too much felicity should be the lot of man on earth, were looking down with angry eyes upon its perfection and conspiring even in the very centre of its power and glory to work its destruction. Nay, they were even gathered, pitiless and vindictive, around the death-bed of the dying warrior and statesman whose hand in the fulness of its strength had placed the coping-stone on the stately and symmetrical structure of the Empire of the Incas. On the rich, many-coloured furs which carpeted the cedar-boarded floor of the golden-walled, silver-ceiled room lit with silver lamps hanging by chains of gold, stood by the bedside in an attitude of attendant deference a very old man clad in the splendid robes which distinguished the priesthood of the Sun.
