Page:Ollanta An Ancient Ynca Drama.pdf/20

12 the comic vein which runs through the piece. Their talk is of Ollanta's love for the princess, and to them enters the High Priest of the Sun, who endeavours, by a miracle, to dissuade the audacious warrior from his forbidden love. In the second scene the princess herself laments to her mother the absence of Ollanta, and her father, the Ynca Pachacutec, expresses warm affection for his child. Two songs of undoubted antiquity are introduced; the first being a harvest song with a chorus threatening the birds that rob the corn, and the second being one of those mournful love-elegies which are peculiar to the Peruvian Indians. In the third scene Ollanta presses his suit upon the Ynca, is scornfully repulsed, and finally bursts out into open defiance, in a soliloquy of great force. Then there is an amusing dialogue with Piqui Chaqui, and another love song concludes the act. In the opening scene of the second act the rebellion of Ollanta is announced to the Ynca, and a general named Rumi-ñaui, or the "Stone Eyed," is ordered to march against him. The rebels hail the warrior Ollanta as their Ynca in the second scene, and prepare to resist the armies of Pachacutec; and in the third, Rumi-ñaui recounts the total defeat of himself and his armies by the rebel Ollanta. Meanwhile Cusi Coyllur had been delivered of a daughter, and for her crime she is immured in a dungeon of the convent of virgins, while her child, named Yma Sumac, is brought up in the same building without being aware of the existence of her mother. The long speech in which the child relates to her keeper the groans she