e, were speeding along a fairly good road which led in a
south-easterly direction, intending to strike off to the eastward in
search of the river some twenty or thirty miles farther on, since they
suspected that the high road would be the last place where their
pursuers would be likely to look for them. But about ten o'clock the
next morning--having encountered meanwhile only a troop of some thirty
loaded llamas with their attendant drivers, whom, having sighted them at
a distance, they easily avoided by concealing themselves until the whole
had passed--they unexpectedly came upon the river again where a bend
brought it close to the road; they therefore deserted the latter at this
point, and, although the going was by no means so easy, thenceforward
followed the river until at length they reached its source high up among
the Andes of Carabaya.

And now ensued a period of incredible hardship and suffering for the
adventurous pair; for they were now among the most lofty of those
stupendous peaks which run in an almost unbroken chain from one end of
the continent to the other, from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the
north to within little more than one hundred miles from the Strait of
Magellan in the south; and their way lay over boundless snowfields,
across enormous glaciers gashed with unfathomable crevasses, up and down
stupendous precipices, and along narrow, ice-clad ledges, where a single
false step must have hurled them to death thousands of feet below. To
journey amid such surroundings was of course bad enough in itself; but
the hardship of it was increased tenfold for the two Englishmen, from
the fact that they came new to it and without experience, after months
of life in the torrid lowlands had thinned their blood and rendered them
peculiarly sensitive to the piercing cold of those high altitudes, which
was further intensified by the icy winds which seemed to rage
continuously about the peaks and come howling at them through the
ravines. Add to this the difficulty of obtaining food--for there was no
life among those mountain solitudes, save an occasional llama or
guanaco, so wild as to be scarcely approachable, and a condor or two
soaring aloft at such a height as to be scarcely distinguishable to the
unaided eye--and the impossibility of making a fire, and the reader will
be able to form some faint idea of what Phil and Dick were called upon
to endure while making that awful passage over the mountains.