and peaceable little man it was
never my good fortune to meet. We looked furtively around for his
fifty savage servants, but all we saw was his good-natured Indian
wife, three or four small children, and a wild-eyed maid-of-all-work,
evidently the only savage present. Saavedra said some called this place
"Jesus Maria" because they were so surprised when they saw it.

It is difficult to describe our feelings as we accepted Saavedra's
invitation to make ourselves at home, and sat down to an abundant meal
of boiled chicken, rice, and sweet cassava (manioc). Saavedra gave us
to understand that we were not only most welcome to anything he had,
but that he would do everything to enable us to see the ruins, which
were, it seemed, at Espiritu Pampa, some distance farther down the
valley, to be reached only by a hard trail passable for barefooted
savages, but scarcely available for us unless we chose to go a
good part of the distance on hands and knees. The next day, while
our carriers were engaged in clearing this trail, Professor Foote
collected a large number of insects, including eight new species of
moths and butterflies.

I inspected Saavedra's plantation. The soil having lain fallow for
centuries, and being rich in humus, had produced more sugar cane than
he could grind. In addition to this, he had bananas, coffee trees,
sweet potatoes, tobacco, and peanuts. Instead of being "a very powerful
chief having many Indians under his control"--a kind of "Pooh-Bah"--he
was merely a pioneer. In the utter wilderness, far from any neighbors,
surrounded by dense forests and a few savages, he had established
his home. He was not an Indian potentate, but only a frontiersman,
soft-spoken and energetic, an ingenious carpenter and mechanic,
a modest Peruvian of the best type.

Owing to the scarcity of arable land he was obliged to cultivate
such pampas as he could find--one an alluvial fan near his house,
another a natural terrace near the river. Back of the house was
a thatched shelter under which he had constructed a little sugar
mill. It had a pair of hardwood rollers, each capable of being turned,
with much creaking and cracking, by a large, rustic wheel made of
roughly hewn timbers fastened together with wooden pins and lashed
with thongs, worked by hand and foot power. Since Saavedra had been
unable to coax any pack animals over the trail to Conservidayoc he
was obliged to depend entirely on his own limited strength and that
of