After watching this stupendous spectacle for a few minutes we go on, and shortly reach another and still loftier quebrada.  Icicles hang from the rocks, the pools of the streams are frozen; we have reached an altitude as high as the summit of Mont Blanc, and our distended lips, swollen hands, and throbbing temples show how great is the rarefaction of the air.

None of us suffer so much from the cold as poor Gahra.  His ebon skin has turned ashen gray, he shivers continually, can hardly speak, and sits on his mule with difficulty.

The country we are in is uninhabited and the trail we are following known only to a few Indians.  I am the first white man, says Gondocori, by whom it has been trodden.

We pass the night in a ruined building of cyclopean dimensions, erected no doubt in the time of the Incas, either for the accommodation of travellers by whom the road was then frequented or for purposes of defence.  But being both roofless, windowless, and fireless, it makes only a poor lodging.  The icy wind blows through a hundred crevices; my limbs are frozen stiff, and when morning comes many of us look more dead than alive.

I asked Condocori how the poor girls of San Andrea could possibly have survived so severe a journey.

“The weaker would have died.  But I did not expect this cold.  The winter is beginning unusually early this year.  Had we been a few days later we should not have got through at all, and if it begins to snow it may go ill with us, even yet.  But to-morrow the worst will be over.”

The cacique had so far behaved very well, treating me as a friend and an equal, and doing all he could for my comfort.  His men treated me as a superior.  Gondocori said very little about his country, still less about Queen Mamcuna, whom he also called “Great Mother.”  To my frequent questions on these subjects he made always the same answer:  “Patience, you will see.”

He did, however, tell me that his people called their country Pachatupec and themselves Pachatupecs, that the Spaniards had never subdued them or even penetrated into the fastnesses where they dwelt, and that they spoke the ancient language of Peru.

Gondocori admitted that his mother was a Christian, and to her he no doubt owed his notions of religion and the regularity of his features.  She had been carried off as he meant to carry off the seven maidens of the Happy Valley, for the misterios had a theory that a mixture of white and Indian blood made the finest children and the boldest warriors.  But white wives being difficult to obtain, mestiza maidens had generally to be accepted, or rather, taken in their stead.

We rose before daybreak and were in the saddle at dawn.  The ground and the streams are hard frozen, and the path is so slippery that the trembling mules dare scarcely put one foot before the other, and our progress is painfully slow.  We are in a broad, stone-strewed valley, partly covered with withered puma-grass, on which a flock of graceful vicunas are quietly grazing, as seemingly unconscious of our presence as the great condors which soar above the snowy peaks that look down on the plain.