two in the morning
And now the young Englishman began to find his time very fully occupied , so much so , indeed , that the days seemed not nearly long enough to enable him to accomplish the half of what he wished to do . There was , for instance , the learning of the Quichua language . Harry had not been domiciled in his palace twenty-four hours before it had become patent to him that this was the first task which he must undertake ; for very few of the nobles had any knowledge whatever of Spanish , and the inconvenience and loss of time involved in conversing through an interpreter were far too great to be passively endured . And , since he could do very little else as satisfactorily as he would wish until he had mastered this rich and expressive language , he devoted four hours of every day -- two in the morning and two in the evening -- to its study . Then he soon learned that , exclusive of the inhabitants of the Valley of the Sun , there were some three hundred and fifty thousand Indians scattered up and down the country , at least one in every ten of whom might be counted as a fighting man . These people had to be brought into the valley , housed , fed , disciplined , in preparation for the time when arms should be put into their hands ; also -- what was more difficult still -- matters had to be so arranged that the families of these men , and all dependent upon them , should suffer neither loss nor inconvenience from the drafting of the able-bodied into the valley . Then the arrangements and preparations for the importation of arms and ammunition into the country -- everything connected with which had , of course , to be done entirely without the knowledge of the authorities -- involved a tremendous amount of hard and intricate work .