“And you never told me, father!” said Angela, reproachfully.  “What are they, these forebodings?”

“Why should you be worried with an old man’s difficulties?  One has reference to my people, the other—­but never mind the other.  It may be that already a way has been opened.—­If you feel sufficiently rested, Monsieur Nigel, I think we had better proceed.  A short walk will bring us to San Cristobal, and it would be well for us to get thither before the heat of the day.”

I protested that the rest and the bunch of grapes had so much refreshed me that I felt equal to a long walk, and we moved on.

“What a splendid garden!” I exclaimed for the third or fourth time as we entered an alley festooned with trailing flowers and grape-vines from which the fruit hung in thick clusters.

“All Quipai is a garden,” said the abbe, proudly.  “We have fruit and flowers and cereals all the year round, thanks to the great azequia (aqueduct) which the Incas built and I restored.  And such fruit!  Let him taste a chirimoya ma fille cherie.”

From a tree about fifteen feet high Angela plucked a round green fruit, not unlike an apple, but covered with small knobs and scales.  Then she showed me how to remove the skin, which covered a snow-white juicy pulp of exquisite fragrance and a flavor that I hardly exaggerated in calling divine.  It was a fruit fit for the gods, and so I said.

“We owe it all to the great azequia,” observed the abbe.  “See, it feeds these rills and fills those fountains, waters our fields, and makes the desert bloom like the rose and the dry places rejoice.  And we have not only fruit and flowers, but corn, coffee, cocoa, yuccas, potatoes, and almost every sort of vegetable.”

“Quipai is a land of plenty and a garden of delight.”

“A most apt description, and so long as the great azequia is kept in repair and the system of irrigation which I have established is maintained it will remain a land of plenty and a garden of delight.”

“And if any harm should befall the azequia?”

“In that case, and if our water-supply were to fail, Quipai, as you see it now, would cease to exist.  The desert, which we are always fighting and have so far conquered, would regain the mastery, and the mission become what I found it, a little oasis at the foot of the Cordillera, supporting with difficulty a few score families of naked Indians.  One of these days, if you are so disposed, you shall follow the course of the azequia and see for yourself with what a marvellous reservoir, fed by Andean snows, Nature has provided us.  But more of this another time.  Look!  Yonder is San Cristobal, our capital as I sometimes call it, though little more than a village.”

The abbe said truly.  It was little more than a village; but as gay, as picturesque, and as bright as a scene in an opera—­two double rows of painted houses forming a large oval, the space between them laid out as a garden with straight walks and fountains and clipped shrubs, after the fashion of Versailles; in the centre a church and two other buildings, one of which, as the abbe told me, was a school, the other his own dwelling.