eneath which he gazed with curious, though gentle eyes, upon the
cavalcade. By-and-by, looking like a string of ants descending a
perpendicular wall, Mary beheld a row of black specks slowly moving.
She was told that these were the mules bringing down the metal in
panniers--the only means of communication, until, as the lieutenant
promised, a perpendicular railroad should be invented. The electricity
of the atmosphere made jokes easily pass current. The mountain was
'only' one of the spurs of the Andes, a mere infant among the giants;
but, had it been set down in Europe, Mont Blanc must have hid his
diminished head; and the view was better than on some of the more
enormous neighbours, which were both further inland, and of such
height, that to gaze from them was 'like looking from an air-balloon
into vacancy.' Whereas here Mary had but to turn her head, as her mule
steadily crept round the causeway--a legacy of the Incas--to behold the
expanse of the Pacific, a sheet of glittering light in the sunshine,
the horizon line raised so high, that the first moment it gave her a
sense of there being something wrong with her eye, before the feeling
of infinity rushed upon her.

They were turning the flank of the mountain, and losing the sunshine.
The evening air was almost chill, and the clearness such that they
already saw the ragged height whither they were bound rising in craggy
shattered grandeur, every flat space or gentler declivity covered with
sheds and huts for the work-people, and cavernous mouths opening on the
cliff-side. Dark figures could be distinctly seen moving about; and as
to the descending mules, they seemed to be close on the other side of a
narrow ravine. Rosita, who, now it came to the point, was not without
fears of sleeping on the bare mountain-side, wanted to push on; she was
sure they could arrive before night, but she was told that she knew
nothing of mountain atmosphere; and she was not discontented with the
bright fire and comfortable arrangements on which they suddenly came,
after turning round a great shoulder of rock. Mr. Robson and the
sumpter-mules had quietly preceded them, and the gipsying on the Andes
was likely to be not much less luxurious than an English pic-nic. The
negro cook had done his best; Mary made her father's coffee, and Rosita
was waited on to her satisfaction. And when darkness came on, too
early for English associations with warm days, the lights of the
village at th