After a while the gigantic undertaking was begun, and little by little, and with infinite patience and pain accomplished.  It was a work of many years, and when I travelled the whole length of the azequia I marvelled greatly how the abbe, with the means at his command, could have achieved an enterprise so arduous and vast.  The aqueduct, nearly twenty leagues in length, extended from the foot of the snow-line to a valley above Quipai, the water being taken thence in stone-lined canals and wooden pipes to the seashore.  In several places the azequia was carried on lofty arches over deep ravines:  and there were two great reservoirs, both remarkable works.  The upper one was the crater of an extinct volcano, of unknown depth, which contained an immense quantity of water.  It took so long to fill that the abbe, as he laughingly told me, began to think that there must be a hole in the bottom.  But in the end it did fill to the very brim, and always remained full.  The second reservoir, a dammed up valley, was just below the first; it served to break the fall from the higher to the lower level and receive the overflow from the crater.

A bursting of either of the reservoirs was quite out of the question; at any rate the abbe so assured me, and certainly the crater looked strong enough to hold all the water in the Andes, could it have been got therein, while the lower reservoir was so shallow—­the out-flow and the loss by evaporation being equal to the in-take—­that even if the banks were to give way no great harm could be done.

I mention these particulars because they have an important bearing on events that afterward befell, and on my own destiny.

Only a born engineer and organizer of untiring energy and illimitable patience could have performed so herculean a labor.  Balthazar was all this, and more.  He knew how to rule men despotically yet secure their love.  The Indians did his bidding without hesitation and wrought for him without pay.  In the absence of this quality his task had never been done.  On the other hand, he owed something to fortune.  All the materials were ready to his hand.  He built with the stone quarried by the Incas.  His work suffered no interruption from frost or snow or rain.  His very isolation was an advantage.  He had neither enemies to fear, friends to please, nor government officers to propitiate.

On the landward side Quipai was accessible only by difficult and little known mountain-passes which nobody without some strong motive would care to traverse, and passing ships might be trusted to give a wide berth to an iron-bound coast destitute alike of harbors and trade.