I dismount and look round.

Backward stretches an endless expanse of bleak and stormy-swept billowy mountains; before us looms, in serried phalanx, the western Cordillera, dazzling white, all save one black-throated colossus, who vomits skyward thick clouds of ashes and smoke, and down whose ragged flanks course streams of fiery lava.
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.