ultivated.
Angela and I half rode, half walked to the top; but the abbe, on the plea
that he had some business to look after, stayed at the bottom.

The crater was about eight hundred yards in diameter and filled nearly to
the brim with crystal water, which outflowed by a wide and well made
channel into the lake, the supply being kept up by the in-flow from the
_azequia_, whose course we could trace far into the mountains.

The view from our coigne of vantage was unspeakably grand. Behind us rose
the stupendous range of the Andes, with its snow-white peaks and smoking
volcanoes; before us the oasis of Quipai rolled like a river of living
green to the shores of the measureless ocean, whose shining waters in that
clear air and under that azure sky seemed only a few miles away, while, as
far as the eye could reach, the coast-line was fringed with the dreary
waste where I had so nearly perished.

The oasis, as I now for the first time discovered, was a valley, a broad
shallow depression in the desert falling in a gentle slope from the foot
of the Cordillera to the sea, whereby its irrigation was greatly
facilitated.

"How beautiful Quipai looks, and how like a river!" said Angela. "That is
what I always think when I come here--how like a river!"

"Who knows that long ago the valley was not the bed of a river!"

"It must be very long ago, then, before there was any Cordillera.
Rain-clouds never cross the Andes, and for untold ages there can have been
no rain here on the coast."

"You are right. Without rain you cannot have much of a river, and if the
_azequia_ were to fail there would be very little left of Quipai."

"Don't suggest anything so dreadful as the failure of the _azequia_. It is
the Palladium of the mission and the source of all our prosperity and
happiness. Besides, how could it fail? You see how solidly it is built,
and every month it is carefully inspected from end to end."

"It might be destroyed by an earthquake."

"You are pleased to be a Job's comforter, Monsieur Nigel. Damaged it might
be, but hardly destroyed, except in some cataclysm which would destroy
everything, and that is a risk which, like all dwellers in countries
subject to earthquakes, we must run. We cannot escape from the conditions
of our existence; and life is so pleasant here, we are spared so many of
the miseries which afflict our fellow-creatures in other parts of the
world--war, pestilence, strife, and want--that it were as fo