Page:The Incas of Peru.djvu/307

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TROUBLOUS TIMES
269

positions of the houses of sixty-six Spanish citizens. Little had been altered in his youth. He remembered three of the great covered halls attached to the palaces of the Incas, 200 paces long by 50, one in the Amaru-cancha or palace of Huayna Ccapac, now the church of the Jesuits, another in the Cassana or palace of Pachacuti, capable of holding 4000 people, and another on the Colcampata. The great hall of the palace of Uira-cocha, on the east side of the great square, was in process of being converted into the cathedral.

The first great trouble remembered by the young Inca was when Gonzalo Pizarro rose against the Viceroy Blasco Nuñez de Vela and the new laws. The Cuzco citizens were forced to join if they did not escape. The elder Garcilasso de la Vega, Pedro del Barco, Antonio Altamirano, and Hernando Bachicao fled to Lima. The three last, two of them fathers of the young Inca's schoolfellows, were hanged by Pizarro's cruel old lieutenant Carbajal. Garcilasso was concealed for weeks in the convent of San Francisco at Lima, but at last Gonzalo Pizarro pardoned him. He was kept as a sort of prisoner, and obliged to accompany the rebels. Meanwhile the house at Cuzco was attacked by the Pizarro faction, and besieged. The garrison consisted of the young Inca with his mother and sister, the Alcobasas, and two faithful maids. They were nearly starved, and when the besiegers got in, the house was pillaged. At last Diego Centeno arrived with the Inca's uncle, Juan