upon; and here Farrell
sails out of the story for ten months, a passenger on the schooner
_Garcia_, bound for Colon.

BOOK III.

THE RETRIEVE.

NIGHT THE FOURTEENTH.

SAN RAMON.

I have never set eyes on the village of San Ramon, but I have heard
it described by two men--by one of them in great detail--and their
descriptions tally.

It is a village or townlet of two hundred houses or so. It lies
about a third of the way down the coast of Peru, close over the sea.
It has no harbour: a population of half-breeds--mestizos? Is that
the word?--sprinkled with whitish cosmopolitans, and here and there a
real white man. But these last, though they wear shoes and keep up
among themselves a pretence to be the aristocracy of the place, have
really resigned life for this anticipatory Paradise where they grow
grey on remittance money, eating the lotus, drinking smoked Scotch in
the hotel veranda, swapping stories, and--since they know one another
all too well in this drowsy decline of their day--feebly and falsely
pretending to one another what gallant knowing fellows they had been
in its morning. As for their shoes, token of their caste, they
usually wear them unlaced by day and not infrequently sleep in them
at night. With the exception of Engelbaum, who keeps the hotel, the
white citizens are unmarried. With the exception of Frau Engelbaum--
aged sixty and stout at that--there are no white ladies in San Ramon.

And yet San Ramon is a Paradise. A tall mountain backs it. The
Pacific kisses its feet. A spring bursting from the mountain, about
four thousand feet up, has cut a gorge down which it tumbles in
cascades to the beach and the salt water. Where the source leaps
from the rock the vegetation begins, as you would expect. It widens
and grows more luxuriant all the way down. The stream comes to a
forty-foot waterfall between sheer rock curtained with creepers;
whence it hurries down through plantations of banana, past San Ramon,
which perches where it can, house by house, on shelves hidden in
greenery. There it takes another great leap into a basin it has
hollowed for itself in the steep-to beach.

We have come down by nature's route. Now we'll climb back by man's.
A sort of stairway, broad-stepped, made of pebbles and pounded earth,
mounts in fairly well engineered zigzags to the plateau above the
lower fall, and in a straighter flight beside the gorge to the hotel
which is the topmost bui