16 The Wine-Dark Sea - Libro della tutto

Patrick O'Brian The Wine-Dark Sea
when a certain slight degree of warmth had
gathered round him, he lay thinking of Eduardo
and their conversations all that afternoon
as they climbed steadily from La Guayra.
Eduardo had given him a detailed account of
Pachacutic Inca, the first great conqueror, and
of his family down to Huayna Capac, the
Great Inca, to Atahualpa, strangled by Pizarro,
and the Inca Manco, Eduardo's ancestor,
and of the many still-existing collateral
families descending from Huayna Capac. It
did not surprise Stephen to hear of bitter enmity
between cousins, nor of feuds lasting
from the earliest times to the present, nor indeed
of brother murdering brother – there
were after all well-established precedents –
but it did surprise him after a while to find that
the general drift of his friend's conversation
seemed more and more to be in the direction
of outside support for one particular branch of