d to furnish us
with either fuel or forage, although we tried to pay in advance and
offered her silver. Nevertheless, we proceeded to pitch our tents
and took advantage of the sheltering stone wall of her corral for
our camp fire. After peace had settled down and it became perfectly
evident that we were harmless, the door of one of the huts opened
and an Indian man appeared. Doubtless the cause of his disappearance
before our arrival had been the easily discernible presence in our
midst of the brass buttons of Corporal Gamarra. Possibly he who had
selected this remote corner of the wilderness for his abode had a
guilty conscience and at the sight of a gendarme decided that he had
better hide at once. More probably, however, he feared the visit of
a recruiting party, since it is quite likely that he had not served
his legal term of military service. At all events, when his wife
discovered that we were not looking for her man, she allowed his
curiosity to overcome his fears. We found that the Indians kept a
few llamas. They also made crude pottery, firing it with straw and
llama dung. They lived almost entirely on gruel made from chuno,
frozen bitter potatoes. Little else than potatoes will grow at 14,000
feet above the sea. For neighbors the Indians had a solitary old man,
who lived half a mile up nearer the glaciers, and a small family,
a mile and a half down the valley.

Before dark the neighbors came to call, and we tried our best to
persuade the men to accompany us up the mountain and help to carry
the loads from the point where the mules would have to stop; but they
declined absolutely and positively. I think one of the men might have
gone, but as soon as his quiet, well-behaved wife saw him wavering
she broke out in a torrent of violent denunciation, telling him the
mountain would "eat him up" and that unless he wanted to go to heaven
before his time he had better let well enough alone and stay where he
was. Cieza de Leon, one of the most careful of the early chroniclers
(1550), says that at Coropuna "the devil" talks "more freely" than
usual. "For some secret reason known to God, it is said that devils
walk visibly about in that place, and that the Indians see them and are
much terrified. I have also heard that these devils have appeared to
Christians in the form of Indians." Perhaps the voluble housewife was
herself one of the famous Coropuna devils. She certainly talked "more
freely" than usual. Or possibly she