ontained an immense quantity of water. It took so long to fill that
the abbe, as he laughingly told me, began to think that there must be a
hole in the bottom. But in the end it did fill to the very brim, and
always remained full. The second reservoir, a dammed up valley, was just
below the first; it served to break the fall from the higher to the lower
level and receive the overflow from the crater.

A bursting of either of the reservoirs was quite out of the question; at
any rate the abbe so assured me, and certainly the crater looked strong
enough to hold all the water in the Andes, could it have been got therein,
while the lower reservoir was so shallow--the out-flow and the loss by
evaporation being equal to the in-take--that even if the banks were to
give way no great harm could be done.

I mention these particulars because they have an important bearing on
events that afterward befell, and on my own destiny.

Only a born engineer and organizer of untiring energy and illimitable
patience could have performed so herculean a labor. Balthazar was all
this, and more. He knew how to rule men despotically yet secure their
love. The Indians did his bidding without hesitation and wrought for him
without pay. In the absence of this quality his task had never been done.
On the other hand, he owed something to fortune. All the materials were
ready to his hand. He built with the stone quarried by the Incas. His work
suffered no interruption from frost or snow or rain. His very isolation
was an advantage. He had neither enemies to fear, friends to please, nor
government officers to propitiate.

On the landward side Quipai was accessible only by difficult and little
known mountain-passes which nobody without some strong motive would care
to traverse, and passing ships might be trusted to give a wide berth to an
iron-bound coast destitute alike of harbors and trade.

So it came to pass that, albeit the mission of Quipai was in the dominion
of the King of Spain, none of his agents knew of its existence, his writs
did not run there, and Balthazar treated the royal decree for the
expulsion of the Jesuits from South America (of which he heard two or
three years after its promulgation) with the contempt that he thought it
deserved. Nevertheless, he deemed it the part of prudence to maintain his
isolation more rigidly than ever, and make his communications with the
outer world few and far between, for had it become known to the
ca