Note 26 — Chapter V

The whites have already had a foretaste of this retribution in La-paz, where, as we have been informed, every white man was massacred. The Indians are said to indulge in the hope of yet seeing a prince of their own race on the throne; and such has been their well-founded and now habitual mistrust of the whites, that they have never revealed where all their own treasures and those of the Incas, which were buried after the death of Atahualpa, are to be found. This is a secret to every one but a chosen few of the caciques. A few years before the commencement of the war of independence in Peru, a rising took place among the Indians of some of the inland provinces, under a cacique named Pomacagua: but this insurrection was soon suppressed. The fact of Pomacagua’s being acquainted with the hiding place of the regal treasure alluded to, and his offer to reveal it to save his life, was not believed by the unrelenting Ramires, and he was shot.