The Inca bowed to the company whereon everyone in the great temple,
save myself alone whose British pride kept me on my feet, standing like
one left living on a battlefield among a multitude of slain, prostrated
himself before his divine majesty. At a sign they rose again and the
Inca seated himself upon his jewelled golden throne beneath the effigy
of the Sun, while Kari took his place upon a lesser throne to the Inca's
right.
Looking at him there in his splendour on this day when he came into his
own again, I bethought me of the wretched, starving Indian marked with
blows and foul with filth whom I had rescued from the cruel mob upon the
Thames-side wharf, and wondered at this enormous change of fortune and
the chain of wonderful events by which it had been brought about.
My fortune also had changed, for then I was great in my own fashion, who
now had become but a wanderer, welcomed indeed in this glittering
new world of which yonder we knew nothing, because I was strange and
different, also full of unheard-of learning and skilled in war, but
still nothing but an outcast wanderer, and so doomed to live and die.
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