, too much, because our brakes would not act any more.
With the snow and rain the rails had become so slippery that we went
sliding down at the most alarming pace. Nor did I feel particularly happy
at having the train only a few hundred metres behind us. Whenever we got
to a station, we had to get off quickly and get our car off the rails to
give room to the incoming train. The cold was intense.

The geological formation of the Andes in that particular region was
remarkable, and more remarkable still was the British engineering triumph
of constructing a railway from the sea to so high an elevation. In one or
two places there were iron bridges of great height and ingenious
construction. You felt a curious sensation as you flew over those bridges
on the tiny car, and you saw between the rails the chasm underneath you;
nor did you feel extraordinarily comfortable when, hundreds of feet down,
down below, at the bottom of one chasm, you saw a railway engine which
had leapt the rails and lay upside down in the middle of a foaming
torrent.

Naturally, in building a mountain railway of that type, a great many
curves and zigzags were necessary, many of those curves taking place
inside tunnels. Along the railway rivers have been switched off through
tunnels within the mountain, and produced picturesque cascades where they
came out again.

The geological surprises were continual. Next to mountains with perfectly
horizontal strata you saw other mountains with strata in a vertical
position, especially in the limestone formation. Farther down immense
superposed terraces were to be noticed upon the mountain side, evidently
made by the ancient dwellers of that country for the cultivation of
their inhospitable land.

This interested me greatly. I had seen among the Igorrotes or
head-hunters of the island of Luzon, in the Philippine Archipelago, that
same method of irrigation, by collecting the water from a high point on
the mountain side in order to irrigate consecutively the series of
terraces. Not only was I struck by the fact of finding so unusual a
method of cultivation at two points of the globe so far apart, but I was
even more impressed by the wonderful resemblance in type between the
local natives and the inhabitants of the northern island of the
Philippines. Undoubtedly these people came from the same stock.

Where we stopped at the different stations there was always something
interesting to observe--now the hundreds of l