y understood them. The
committee, however, which had for nearly a month been preparing itself
for the task of initiating the young Inca into the secrets of good
government, had arranged a procedure of such a character that even in
the course of that one morning's instruction they contrived to give
Escombe a sufficiently clear general insight of the subject to enable
him to see that, taken altogether, the system of government was
admirably designed to secure the prosperity of the nation.

Then, in the afternoon, at the instigation of the Council of Seven, who
had now become a sort of cabinet, to control the machinery of
government, under the supervision of the Inca, Harry was conducted, by
an official who performed the functions of Chief of the Treasury,
through the enormous vaults beneath the palace, in order that he might
view the treasure, industriously accumulated during more than three
hundred years, to form the sinews of war for the regeneration of the
race which was Escombe's great predestined task.

If, before visiting these vaults, Harry had been invited to express an
opinion upon the subject, he would have confidently asserted the
conviction that such treasure as the inhabitants of the Valley of the
Sun had been able to accumulate must all, or very nearly all, have been
expended in the adornment of the great temple and the royal palace. But
that such a conviction would have been absolutely erroneous was speedily
demonstrated when the great bronze doors guarding the entrance of the
vaults were thrown open. For the first room into which he was
conducted--an apartment measuring some twenty feet wide by thirty feet
long, and about fourteen feet high--was full of great stacks of silver
bars, each bar being about twenty pounds in weight; the stacks, of
varying height, being arranged in tiers of three running lengthwise
along the room, with two narrow longitudinal passages between them.
Escombe, after staring in dumb amazement at this enormous accumulation
of dull white metal, drew from his pocket a small memorandum book and
pencil which he had found in one of the pockets of his old clothes, and,
with the instinct of the engineer rising for a moment to the surface,
made a rapid calculation by which he arrived at the astounding result
that there must be very nearly eight hundred tons of bar silver in the
stacks before him!

From this room he was conducted into another of about the same size, and
similarly arrange