inacochas should prove to be over a thousand, for I had brought
no extra line. Even nine hundred feet would make sounding slow work,
and the lake covered an area of over seventy square miles.

It was with mixed feelings of trepidation and expectation that I rowed
out five miles from shore and made a sounding. Holding the large reel
firmly in both hands, I cast the lead overboard. The reel gave a turn
or two and stopped. Something was wrong. The line did not run out. Was
the reel stuck? No, the apparatus was in perfect running order. Then
what was the matter? The bottom was too near! Alas for all the pains
that Mr. Bassett had taken to put a thousand feet of the best strong
24-thread line on one reel! Alas for Mr. Watkins and his patient
insertion of one hundred and sixty-six "fathom-markers"! The bottom of
the lake was only four feet away from the bottom of my boat! After
three or four days of strenuous rowing up and down the eighteen
miles of the lake's length, and back and forth across the seventeen
miles of its width, I never succeeded in wetting Watkins's first
marker! Several hundred soundings failed to show more than five feet of
water anywhere. Possibly if we had come in the rainy season we might
at least have wet one marker, but at the time of our visit (November,
1911), the lake had a maximum depth of 4 1/2 feet. The satisfaction of
making this slight contribution to geographic knowledge was, I fear,
lost in the chagrin of not finding a really noteworthy body of water.

Who would have thought that so long a lake could be so
shallow? However, my feelings were soothed by remembering the story of
the captain of a man-of-war who was once told that the salt lake near
one of the red hills between Honolulu and Pearl Harbor was reported
by the natives to be "bottomless." He ordered one of the ship's heavy
boats to be carried from the shore several miles inland to the salt
lake, at great expenditure of strength and labor. The story told me
in my boyhood does not say how much sounding line was brought. Anyhow,
they found this "fathomless" body of water to be not more than fifteen
feet deep.

Notwithstanding my disappointment at the depth of Parinacochas, I
was very glad that we had brought the little folding boat, for it
enabled me to float gently about among the myriads of birds which
use the shallow waters of the lake as a favorite feeding ground;
pink flamingoes, white gulls, small "divers," large black ducks,
sand