me,
gave me much uneasiness and pain. The fame of the bridge over the
Apurimac is coextensive with Peru, and every one we met who had crossed
it was full of frightful reminiscences of his passage: how the frail
structure swayed at a dizzy height between gigantic cliffs over a dark
abyss, filled with the deep, hoarse roar of the river, and how his eyes
grew dim, his heart grew faint, and his feet unsteady as he struggled
across it, not daring to cast a look on either hand.

Our road to the bridge was circuitous and precipitous, leading down the
steeper side of the ridge of La Banca, where it seemed hardly possible
for a goat to find foothold. It was a succession of abrupt zigzags, here
and there interrupted by a stretch of horizontal pathway. To see our
cavalcade it was necessary to look up or down, not before or behind. It
was like descending the coils of a flattened corkscrew. In places the
rocks encroached on the trail so that it was necessary to crouch low on
the saddle-bow to pass beneath them, or else throw the weight of the
body on the stirrup overhanging the declivity of the mountain, to avoid
a collision. The most dangerous parts, however, were where land-slips
had occurred, and where it was impossible to construct a pathway not
liable at any moment to glide away beneath the feet of our animals.
The gorge narrowed as we descended, until it was literally shut in by
precipices of stratified rock strangely contorted; while huge masses of
stone, rent and splintered as from some terrible convulsion of nature,
rose sheer before us, apparently preventing all exit from the sunless
and threatening ravine, at the bottom of which a considerable stream
struggled, with a hoarse roar, among the black boulders.

There was foothold for neither tree nor shrub, and our mules picked
their way warily, with head and ears pointed downward, among the broken
and angular masses. The occasional shouts of the arrieros sounded here
sharp and percussive, and seemed to smite themselves to death against
the adamantine walls. There was no room for echo. Finally the ravine
became so narrowed between the precipitous mountain-sides as barely to
afford room for the stream and our scant party. Here a roar, deeper,
stronger, and sterner than that of the stream which we had followed,
reached our ears, and we knew it was the voice of the "Great Speaker."
A little farther on we came in view of the river and two or three low
huts built on the circumscr