The crater was about eight hundred yards in diameter and filled nearly to the brim with crystal water, which outflowed by a wide and well made channel into the lake, the supply being kept up by the in-flow from the azequia, whose course we could trace far into the mountains.

The view from our coigne of vantage was unspeakably grand.  Behind us rose the stupendous range of the Andes, with its snow-white peaks and smoking volcanoes; before us the oasis of Quipai rolled like a river of living green to the shores of the measureless ocean, whose shining waters in that clear air and under that azure sky seemed only a few miles away, while, as far as the eye could reach, the coast-line was fringed with the dreary waste where I had so nearly perished.

The oasis, as I now for the first time discovered, was a valley, a broad shallow depression in the desert falling in a gentle slope from the foot of the Cordillera to the sea, whereby its irrigation was greatly facilitated.

“How beautiful Quipai looks, and how like a river!” said Angela.  “That is what I always think when I come here—­how like a river!”

“Who knows that long ago the valley was not the bed of a river!”

“It must be very long ago, then, before there was any Cordillera.  Rain-clouds never cross the Andes, and for untold ages there can have been no rain here on the coast.”

“You are right.  Without rain you cannot have much of a river, and if the azequia were to fail there would be very little left of Quipai.”

“Don’t suggest anything so dreadful as the failure of the azequia.  It is the Palladium of the mission and the source of all our prosperity and happiness.  Besides, how could it fail?  You see how solidly it is built, and every month it is carefully inspected from end to end.”

“It might be destroyed by an earthquake.”

“You are pleased to be a Job’s comforter, Monsieur Nigel.  Damaged it might be, but hardly destroyed, except in some cataclysm which would destroy everything, and that is a risk which, like all dwellers in countries subject to earthquakes, we must run.  We cannot escape from the conditions of our existence; and life is so pleasant here, we are spared so many of the miseries which afflict our fellow-creatures in other parts of the world—­war, pestilence, strife, and want—­that it were as foolish and ungrateful to make ourselves unhappy because we are exposed to some remote danger against which we cannot guard, as to repine because we cannot live forever.”

“You discourse most excellent philosophy, Mademoiselle Angela.”

“Without knowing it, then, as Monsieur Jourdan talked prose.”

“So!  You have read Moliere?”

“Over and over again.”

“Then you must have a library at San Cristobal.”

“A very small one, as you may suppose; but a small library is not altogether a disadvantage, as the abbe says.  The fewer books you have the oftener you read them; and it is better to read a few books well than many superficially.”