With the World's Great Travellers Volume Ii Part 16

On our left is the most sublime spectacle in the New World. It is a majestic pile of snow, its clear outline on the deep blue sky describing the profile of a lion in repose. At noon the vertical sun, and the profusion of light reflected from the glittering surface, will not allow a shadow to be cast on any part, so that you can easily fancy the figure is cut out of a mountain of spotless marble. This is Chimborazo,--yet not the whole of it,--you see but a third of the great giant. His feet are as eternally green as his head is everlastingly white; but they are far away beneath the banana and cocoanut palms of the Pacific coast.

Rousseau was disappointed when he first saw the sea; and the first glimpse of Niagara often fails to meet one's expectations. But Chimborazo is sure of a wors.h.i.+pper the moment its overwhelming grandeur breaks upon the traveller. You feel that you are in the presence-chamber of the monarch of the Andes. There is sublimity in his kingly look of which the ocean might be proud.

"All that expands the spirit, yet appeals, Gathers around this summit, as if to show How earth may pierce to heaven, yet leave vain man below."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MONARCHS OF THE ANDES]

Well do we remember our disappointment as we stood before that wonder of the world,--St. Peter's. We mounted the pyramid of steps and looked up, but were not overcome by the magnificence. We read in our guide-book that the edifice covers eight acres, and to the tip-top of the cross is almost five hundred feet; that it took three hundred and fifty years and twelve successive artists to finish it and an expenditure of fifty million dollars, and now costs thirty thousand dollars per annum to keep it in repair, still we do not appreciate its greatness. We pushed aside the curtain and walked in,--walked a day's journey across the transept and up and down the everlasting nave, and yet continued heterodox. We tried hard to believe it was very vast and sublime, and we knew we ought to feel its grandeur, but somehow we did not. Then we sat down by the Holy of Holies, and there we were startled into a better judgment by the astounding fact that the Cathedral of St. Paul--the largest edifice in Great Britain--could stand upright, spire, dome, body, and all, inside of St. Peter's! that the letters of the inscription which run round the _base_ of the dome, though apparently but an inch, are in reality six feet high! Then for the first time the scales fell from our eyes, the giant building began to grow; higher and higher still it rose, longer and deeper it expanded, yet in perfect proportions; the colossal structure, now a living temple, put on its beautiful garments and the robe of majesty. And that dome! the longer we looked at it the vaster it grew, till finally it seemed to be a temple not made with hands; the s.p.a.cious canopy became the firmament; the mosaic figures of cherubim and seraphim were endowed with life; and as we fixed our eyes on the zenith where the Almighty is represented in glory, we thought we had the vision of Stephen. Long we gazed upward into this heaven of man's creation, and gazed again till we were lost in wonder.

But the traveller needs no such steps to lift him up to the grand conception of the divine Architect as he beholds the great white dome of Chimborazo. It looks lofty from the very first. Now and then an expanse of thin, sky-like vapor would cut the mountain in twain, and the dome, islanded in the deep blue of the upper regions, seemed to belong more to heaven than to earth. We knew that Chimborazo was more than twice the alt.i.tude of Etna. We could almost see the great Humboldt struggling up the mountain's side till he looked like a black speck moving over the mighty white, but giving up in despair four thousand feet below the summit. We see the intrepid Bolivar mounting still higher; but the hero of Spanish-American independence returns a defeated man. Last of all comes the philosophic Boussingault, and attains the prodigious elevation of nineteen thousand six hundred feet,--the highest point reached by man without the aid of a balloon; but the dome remains unsullied by his foot. Yet none of these facts increase our admiration. The mountain has a tongue which speaks louder than all mathematical calculations.

There must be something singularly sublime about Chimborazo, for the spectator at Riobamba is already nine thousand feet high, and the mountain is not so elevated above him as Mont Blanc above the vale of Chamouni, when, in reality, that culminating point of Europe would not reach up even to the snow-limit of Chimborazo by two thousand feet. It is only while sailing on the Pacific that one sees Chimborazo in its complete proportions. Its very magnificence diminishes the impression of awe and wonder, for the Andes on which it rests are heaved to such a vast alt.i.tude above the sea, that the relative elevation of its summit becomes reduced by comparison with the surrounding mountains. Its alt.i.tude is twenty-one thousand four hundred and twenty feet, or forty-five times the height of Strasburg cathedral; or, to state it otherwise, the fall of one pound from the top of Chimborazo would raise the temperature of water thirty degrees. One-fourth of this is perpetually covered with snow, so that its ancient name Chimpurazu--the mountain of snow--is very appropriate. It is a stirring thought that this mountain, now mantled with snow, once gleamed with volcanic fires.

There is a hot spring on the north side, and an immense amount of debris covers the slope below the snow-limit, consisting chiefly of fine-grained, iron-stained trachyte and coa.r.s.e porphyroid gray trachyte; very rarely a dark vitreous trachyte. Chimborazo is very likely not a solid mountain; trachytic volcanoes are supposed to be full of cavities.

Bouger found it made the plumb line deviate 7" or 8".

The valleys which furrow the flank of Chimborazo are in keeping with its colossal size. Narrower, but deeper, than those of the Alps, the mind swoons and sinks in the effort to comprehend their grim majesty. The mountain appears to have been broken to pieces like so much thin crust, and the strata thrown on their vertical edges, revealing deep, dark chasms, that seem to lead to the confines of the lower world. The deepest valley in Europe, that of the Ordesa in the Pyrenees, is three thousand two hundred feet deep; but here are rents in the side of Chimborazo in which Vesuvius could be put away out of sight. As you look down into the fathomless fissure, you see a white fleck rising out of the gulf, and expanding as it mounts, till the wings of the condor, fifteen feet in spread, glitter in the sun as the proud bird fearlessly wheels over the dizzy chasm, and then, ascending above your head, sails over the dome of Chimborazo. Could the condor speak, what a glowing description he could give of the landscape beneath him when his horizon is a thousand miles in diameter! If

"Twelve fair counties saw the blaze from Malvern's lonely height,"

what must be the panorama from a height fifteen times higher!

Chimborazo was long supposed to be the tallest mountain on the globe, but its supremacy has been supplanted by Mount Everest in Asia, and Aconcagua in Chile. In mountain gloom and glory, however, it still stands unrivalled. The Alps have the avalanche, "the thunderbolt of snow," and the glaciers, those icy Niagaras so beautiful and grand. Here they are wanting. The monarch of the Andes sits motionless in calm serenity and unbroken silence. The silence is absolute and actually oppressive. The road from Guayaquil to Quito crosses Chimborazo at the elevation of fourteen thousand feet. Save the rush of the trade wind in the afternoon, as it sweeps over the Andes, not a sound is audible; not the hum of an insect, nor the chirp of a bird, nor the roar of the puma, nor the music of running waters. Mid-ocean is never so silent. You can almost hear the globe turning on its axis. There was a time when the monarch deigned to speak, and spoke with a voice of thunder, for the lava on its sides is an evidence of volcanic activity. But ever since the morning stars sang together over man's creation Chimbo has sat in sullen silence, satisfied to look "from his throne of clouds o'er half the world." There is something very suggestive in this silence of Chimborazo. It was once full of noise and fury; it is now a _completed_ mountain, and thunders no more. How silent was Jesus, a completed character! The reason that we are so noisy is that we are so full of wants; we are _unfinished_ characters. Had we perfect fulness of all things, the beat.i.tude of being without a want, we should lapse into the eternal silence of G.o.d.

Chimborazo is a leader of a long train of ambitious crags and peaks; but as he who comes after the king must not expect to be noticed, we will only take a glimpse of these lesser lights as we pa.s.s up the Western Cordillera, and then down the Eastern.

The first after leaving the monarch is Caraguairazo. The Indians call it "the wife of Chimborazo." They are separated only by a very narrow valley. One hundred and seventy years ago the top of this mountain fell in, and torrents of mud flowed out containing mult.i.tudes of fishes. It is now over seventeen thousand feet high, and is one of the most Alpine of the Quitonian volcanoes, having sharp pinnacles instead of the smooth trachytic domes--usually double domes--so characteristic of the Andean summits. And now we pa.s.s in rapid succession numerous picturesque mountains, some of them extinct volcanoes, as Iliniza, presenting two pyramidal peaks, the highest seventeen thousand feet above the sea, and Corazon, so named from its heart-shaped summit, till we reach Pichincha, whose smoking crater is only five miles distant in a straight line from the city of Quito, or eleven by the travelled route.

The crown of this mountain presents three groups of rocky peaks. The most westerly one is called Rucu-Pichincha, and alone manifests activity. To the northeast of Rucu is Guagua-Pichincha, a ruined flue of the same fiery furnace; and between the two is Cundur-Guachana.

Pichincha is the only volcano in Ecuador which has not a true cone crater. Some violent eruption beyond the reach of history or tradition has formed an enormous funnel-shaped basin two thousand five hundred feet deep, fifteen hundred in diameter at the bottom, and expanding upward to a width of three-fourths of a mile. It is the _deepest_ crater on the globe. That of Kilauea is six hundred feet; Orizaba, five hundred; Etna, three hundred; Hecla, one hundred. Vesuvius is a portable furnace in comparison. The abyss is girt with a ragged wall of dark trachyte, which rises on the inside at various angles between forty-five degrees and perpendicularity. As we know of but one American besides the members of our expedition (Mr. Farrand, a photographer) who has succeeded in entering the crater of this interesting volcano, we will give a brief sketch of our visit.

Leaving Quito in the afternoon by the old arched gate-way at the foot of Panecillo, and crossing a spur of the mountain, we stopped for the night at the Jesuit hacienda, situated in the beautiful valley of Lloa, but nearly ruined by the earthquake of 1859. On the damp walls of this monastery, perched ten thousand two hundred and sixty-eight feet above the ocean, we found several old paintings, among them a copy of the _Visitation_ by Rubens. The sunset views in this heart of the Andes were surpa.s.singly beautiful. Mounting our horses at break of day, and taking an Indian guide, we ascended rapidly by a narrow and difficult path through the forest that belts the volcano up to the height of twelve thousand feet, emerging gradually into a thicket of stunted bushes, and then entered the dreary _paramo_. Splendid was the view of the Eastern Cordillera. At least six dazzling white volcanoes were in sight just across the valley of Quito, among them table-topped Cayambi, majestic Antisana, and princely Cotopaxi, whose tapering summit is a mile above the clouds. Toiling upward we reached the base of the cone where vegetation ceased entirely; and tying our horses to some huge rocks that had fallen from the mural cliff above, we started off on hands and feet for the crater. The cone is deeply covered with sand and cinders for about two hundred feet, and the sides are inclined at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. At ten o'clock we reached the brim of the crater, and the great gulf burst suddenly into view.

We can never forget the impression made upon us by the sight. We speak of many things here below as awful, but that word has its full meaning when carried to the top of Pichincha. There you see a frightful opening in the earth's crust nearly a mile in width and half a mile deep, and from the dark abyss comes rolling up a cloud of sulphurous vapors. Monte Somma in the time of Strabo was a miniature; but this crater is on the top of a mountain four times the height of the Italian volcano.

Imagination finds it difficult to conceive a spectacle of more fearful grandeur or such solemn magnificence. It well accords with Milton's picture of the bottomless pit. The united effect of the silence and solitude of the place, the great depth of the cavity, the dark precipitous sides, and the column of smoke standing over an unseen crevice, was to us more impressive than thundering Cotopaxi or fiery Vesuvius. Humboldt, after standing on this same brink, exclaimed, "I have never beheld a grander or more remarkable picture than that presented by this volcano;" and La Condamine compared it to "the Chaos of the poets."

Below us are the smouldering fires which may any moment spring forth into a conflagration; around us are black, ragged cliffs,--fit boundary for this gate-way to the infernal regions. They look as if they had just been dragged up from the central furnace of the earth. Life seems to have fled in terror from the vicinity; even lichens, the children of the bare rocks, refuse to clothe the scathed and beetling crags. For some moments made mute by the dreadful sight, we stood like statues on the rim of the mighty caldron, with our eyes riveted on the abyss below, lost in contemplating that which cannot be described. The panorama from this lofty summit is more pleasing, but equally sublime. Towards the rising sun is the long range of the Eastern Cordillera, hiding from our view the great valley of the Amazon. To right and left are the peaks of another procession of august mountains from Cotocachi to Chimborazo. We are surrounded by the great patriarchs of the Andes, and their speaker, Cotopaxi, ever and anon sends his muttering voice over the land.

The view westward is like looking down from a balloon. Those parallel ridges of the mountain chain, dropping one behind the other, are the gigantic staircase by which the ice-crowned Chimborazo steps down to the sea. A white sea of clouds covers the peaceful Pacific and the lower parts of the coast. But the vapory ocean, curling into the ravines, beautifully represents little coves and bays, leaving islands and promontories like a true ocean on a broken sh.o.r.e. We seem raised above the earth, which lies like an opened map below us; we can look down on the upper surface of the clouds, and, were it night, down too upon the lightnings....

The first to reach the brink of the crater were the French Academicians in 1742. Sixty years after Humboldt stood on the summit. But it was not until 1844 that any one dared to enter the crater. This was accomplished by Garcia Moreno, now President of Ecuador, and Sebastian Wisse, a French engineer. Humboldt p.r.o.nounced the bottom of the crater "inaccessible from its great depth and precipitous descent." We found it accessible, but exceedingly perilous. The moment we prepared to descend our guide ran away. We went on without him, but when half-way down were stopped by a precipice.

On the 22d of October, 1867, we returned to Pichincha with another guide and entered the crater by a different route. Manuel, our Indian, led us to the south side, and over the brink we went. We were not long in realizing the danger of the undertaking. Here the snow concealed an ugly fissure or covered a treacherous rock (for nearly all the rocks are crumbling), there we must cross a ma.s.s of loose sand moving like a glacier down the almost vertical side of the crater; and on every hand rocks were giving way, and, gathering momentum at each revolution, went thundering down, leaping over precipices and jostling other rocks, which joined in the race, till they all struck the bottom with a deep rumbling sound, s.h.i.+vered like so many bomb-sh.e.l.ls into a thousand pieces, and telling us what would be our fate if we made a single misstep. We followed our Indian in single file, keeping close together, that the stones set free by those in the rear might not dash those below from their feet; feeling our way with the greatest caution, clinging with our hands to the snow, sand, rocks, tufts of gra.s.s, or anything that would hold for a moment; now leaping over a chasm, now letting ourselves down from rock to rock; at times paralyzed with fear, and always with death staring us in the face; thus we scrambled for two hours and a half till we reached the bottom of the crater.

Here we found a deeply furrowed plain strewn with ragged rocks, and containing a few patches of vegetation, with half a dozen species of flowers. In the centre is an irregular heap of stones, two hundred and sixty feet high by eight hundred in diameter. This is the cone of eruption,--its sides and summit covered with an imposing group of vents, seventy in number, all lined with sulphur and exhaling steam, black smoke, and sulphurous gas. The temperature of the vapor just within the fumarole is 184, water boiling beside it at 189.

The central vent or chimney gives forth a sound like the violent bubbling of boiling water. As we sat on this fiery mount surrounded by a circular rampart of rocks, and looked up at the immense towers of dark dolerite which ran up almost vertically to the height of twenty-five hundred feet above us, musing over the tremendous force which fas.h.i.+oned this awful amphitheatre,--s.p.a.cious enough for all the G.o.ds of Tartarus to hold high carnival,--the clouds which hung in the thin air around the crest of the crater pealed forth thunder after thunder, which, reverberating from precipice to precipice, were answered by the crash of rocks let loose by the storm, till the whole mountain seemed to tremble like a leaf. Such acoustics, mingled with the flash of lightning and the smell of brimstone, made us believe that we had fairly got into the realm of Pluto. It is the spot where Dante's "Inferno" ought to be read.

INCA HIGH-ROADS AND BRIDGES.

E. GEORGE SQUIER.

[Squier's "Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas" is the source of our present selection. The author, Ephraim George Squier, was born in Albany County, New York, in 1821. He studied the aboriginal monuments of New York, and afterwards travelled and made extensive archaeological researches in Central America. He was appointed United States Commissioner to Peru in 1863, and made important studies of the ancient ruins of that country. We give his interesting account of the perilous crossing of the Apurimac.]

The great and elaborate highways, or public roads, which the chroniclers and the historians, following their authority, tell us were constructed by the Incas throughout their vast empire, all radiating north, east, south, and west from the imperial city of Cuzco, if they existed at all in Central and Southern Peru, have disappeared, leaving here and there only short sections or fragments, hardly justifying the extravagant praise that has been bestowed on them. The modern mule-paths, miscalled roads, must necessarily follow nearly, if not exactly, the routes of the Indians under the Empire. The physical conformation of the country is such that communication between _puna_ and _puna_, and from valley to valley, must always be made by the same pa.s.ses. All these pa.s.ses over the mountains are marked by huge piles of stone raised, like the cairns of Scotland and Wales, by the contribution of a single stone from each traveller as an offering to the spirits of the mountains, and as an invocation for their aid in sustaining the fatigues of travel. These great stone heaps still exist, and will remain to the end of time, monuments marking forever the routes of travel in the days of the Incas.

We know, therefore, from these rude monuments very nearly what were the ancient lines of communication. These are also further indicated by remains of the _tambos_, which occur at intervals all through the country, and oftenest in places remote from supplies, in cold and desert districts, where the traveller stands most in need of food and shelter.

The modern voyager would consider himself supremely fortunate were he to find one in a hundred of these tambos, now in existence; for travelling in Peru is infinitely more difficult and dangerous than it was in the days of the Incas: more difficult, because the facilities are less; more dangerous, because the laws are more lax, and the moral standard of the people lower. The influence of Spain in Peru has been every way deleterious; the civilization of the country was far higher before the Conquest than now.

As I have said, few traces of the Inca roads, such as are described by the early writers, and such as Humboldt saw in Northern Peru, are now to be found in the southern part of that country; and as the modern pathways must follow the ancient lines, I infer that they never existed here, for there is no reason why they should have suffered more from time and the elements in one part of the country than in another.

Between Cuzco and the sweet valley of Yucay there are numerous traces of an ancient road, some sections of which are perfect. These sections coincide in character with the long reaches in the direction of Quito.

They consist of a pathway from ten to twelve feet wide, raised slightly in the centre, paved with stones, and the edges defined by larger stones sunk firmly in the ground. Where this road descends from the elevated _puna_--a sheer descent of almost four thousand feet into the valley of Yucay--it zigzags on a narrow shelf cut in the face of the declivity, and supported here and there, where foothold could not otherwise be obtained, by high retaining-walls of cut stone, looking as perfect and firm as when first built centuries ago.

High mountain-ranges and broad and frigid deserts, swept by fierce, cold winds, are not the sole obstacles to intercommunication in the Altos of Peru, and among those snow-crowned monarchs of the Andes and Cordilleras. There are deep valleys, gorges, and ravines among the mountains, or cut deep in the plains that alternate with them, in which flow swelling rivers or rapid torrents, fed by the melting snows in the dry season, and swollen by the rains in the wet season. They are often unfordable, but still they must somehow be pa.s.sed by the traveller. A few bridges of stone were constructed by the Spaniards, some after the Conquest, and a few others have been erected by their descendants; but, as a rule, the rivers and mountain-torrents are pa.s.sed to-day by the aid of devices the same as were resorted to by the Incas, and at points which they selected.

Had the principle of the arch been well understood by the ancient inhabitants, who have left some of the finest stone-cutting and masonry to be found in the world, there is no doubt the interior of Peru would have abounded in bridges rivalling those of Rome in extent and beauty.

As it was, occupying a country dest.i.tute of timber, they resorted to suspension-bridges, no doubt precisely like those now constructed by their descendants and successors,--bridges formed of cables of braided withes, stretched from bank to bank, and called _puentes de mimbres_ (bridges of withes). Where the banks are high, or where the streams are compressed between steep or precipitous rocks, these cables are anch.o.r.ed to piers of stone. In other places they are approached by inclined causeways, raised to give them the necessary elevation above the water.

Three or four cables form the floor and the princ.i.p.al support of the bridge, over which small sticks, sometimes only sections of cane or bamboo, are laid transversely, and fastened to the cables by vines, cords, or thongs of raw hide. Two smaller cables are sometimes stretched on each side as a guard or hand-rail. Over these frail and swaying structures pa.s.s men and animals, the latter frequently with their load on their backs.

Each bridge is usually kept up by the munic.i.p.ality of the nearest village; and as it requires renewal every two or three years, the Indians are obliged at stated periods to bring to the spot a certain number of withes of peculiar kinds of tough wood, generally of that variety called ioke, which are braided by experts, and then stretched across the stream or river by the united exertions of the inhabitants.

Some of the larger and most important structures of this kind are kept up by the government, and all pa.s.sengers and merchandise pay a fixed toll. Such is the case with the great bridge over the Apurimac, on the main road from the ancient Guamanga (now Ayacucho) to Cuzco.

The Apurimac is one of the head-waters of the Amazon, a large and rapid stream, flowing in a deep valley, or rather gigantic ravine, shut in by high and precipitous mountains. Throughout its length it is crossed at only a single point, between two enormous cliffs, which rise dizzily on both sides, and from the summits of which the traveller looks down into a dark gulf. At the bottom gleams a white line of water, whence struggles up a dull but heavy roar, giving to the river its name, _Apu-rimac_ signifying, in the Quichua tongue, "the great speaker." From above, the bridge, looking like a mere thread, is reached by a path which on one side traces a thin, white line on the face of the mountain, and down which the boldest traveller may hesitate to venture. This path, on the other side, at once disappears from a rocky shelf, where there is just room enough to hold the hut of the bridge-keeper, and then runs through a dark tunnel cut in the rock, from which it emerges to trace its line of many a steep and weary zigzag of the face of the mountain.

It is usual for the traveller to time his day's journey so as to reach this bridge in the morning, before the strong wind sets in; for during the greater part of the day it sweeps up the canon of the Apurimac with great force, and then the bridge sways like a gigantic hammock, and crossing is next to impossible.

It was a memorable incident in my travelling experiences, the crossing of this great swinging bridge of the Apurimac. I shall never forget it, even if it were not a.s.sociated with a circ.u.mstance which, for the time, gave me much uneasiness and pain. The fame of the bridge over the Apurimac is coextensive with Peru, and every one we met who had crossed it was full of frightful reminiscences of his pa.s.sage: how the frail structure swayed at a dizzy height between gigantic cliffs over a dark abyss, filled with the deep, hoa.r.s.e roar of the river, and how his eyes grew dim, his heart grew faint, and his feet unsteady as he struggled across it, not daring to cast a look on either hand.

Our road to the bridge was circuitous and precipitous, leading down the steeper side of the ridge of La Banca, where it seemed hardly possible for a goat to find foothold. It was a succession of abrupt zigzags, here and there interrupted by a stretch of horizontal pathway. To see our cavalcade it was necessary to look up or down, not before or behind. It was like descending the coils of a flattened corkscrew. In places the rocks encroached on the trail so that it was necessary to crouch low on the saddle-bow to pa.s.s beneath them, or else throw the weight of the body on the stirrup overhanging the declivity of the mountain, to avoid a collision. The most dangerous parts, however, were where land-slips had occurred, and where it was impossible to construct a pathway not liable at any moment to glide away beneath the feet of our animals.

The gorge narrowed as we descended, until it was literally shut in by precipices of stratified rock strangely contorted; while huge ma.s.ses of stone, rent and splintered as from some terrible convulsion of nature, rose sheer before us, apparently preventing all exit from the sunless and threatening ravine, at the bottom of which a considerable stream struggled, with a hoa.r.s.e roar, among the black boulders.

There was foothold for neither tree nor shrub, and our mules picked their way warily, with head and ears pointed downward, among the broken and angular ma.s.ses. The occasional shouts of the arrieros sounded here sharp and percussive, and seemed to smite themselves to death against the adamantine walls. There was no room for echo. Finally the ravine became so narrowed between the precipitous mountain-sides as barely to afford room for the stream and our scant party. Here a roar, deeper, stronger, and sterner than that of the stream which we had followed, reached our ears, and we knew it was the voice of the "Great Speaker."

A little farther on we came in view of the river and two or three low huts built on the circ.u.mscribed s.p.a.ce where the two streams came close together. Our muleteers were already busy in unloading the baggage, preparatory to its being carried across the bridge on the cicatrized backs of the occupants of the huts.

To the left of the huts, swinging high in a graceful curve, between the precipices on either side, looking wonderfully frail and gossamer-like, was the famed bridge of the Apurimac. A steep, narrow path, following for some distance a natural shelf, formed by the stratification of the rock, and for the rest of the way hewn in its face, led up, for a hundred feet, to a little platform, also cut in the rock, where were fastened the cables supporting the bridge. On the opposite bank was another and rather larger platform, partly roofed by the rock, where was the windla.s.s for making the cables taut, and where, perched like goats on some mountain-shelf, lived the custodians of the bridge. The path could barely be discovered turning sharp around a rocky projection to the left of this perch, then reappearing high above it, and then, after many a zigzag, losing itself in the dark mouth of a tunnel.

My companions and myself lost no time in extracting the measuring tapes and sounding lines from our _alforjas_, and hurriedly scrambled up the rocky pathway to the bridge. It was in bad condition. The cables had slacked so that the centre of the bridge hung from twelve to fifteen feet lower than its ends, and, then, the cables had not stretched evenly, so that one side was considerably lower than the other. The cables on either hand, intended to answer the double purpose of stays and parapets, had not sunk with the bridge, and were so high up that they could not be reached without difficulty; and many of the lines dropping from them to the floor, originally placed widely apart, had been broken, so that practically they were useful neither for security nor for inspiring confidence.

Travelling in the Andes soon cures one of any nervousness about heights and depths, and is a specific against dizziness. Nevertheless, we all gave a rather apprehensive glance at the frail structure before us, but we had no difficulty in crossing and recrossing--as we did several times--except on approaching the ends, to which our weight transferred the sag of the cables and made the last few yards rather steep. A stiff breeze swept up the canon of the river, and caused a vibration of the bridge from side to side of at least six feet. The motion, however, inspired no sense of danger.

We carefully measured the length and alt.i.tude of the bridge, and found it to be from fastening to fastening one hundred and forty-eight feet long, and at its lowest part one hundred and eighteen feet above the river. Mr. Markham, who crossed it in 1855, estimated the length at ninety feet and the height at three hundred feet. Lieutenant Gibbon, who crossed it in 1857, estimated the length at three hundred and twenty-four feet and the height one hundred and fifty feet. Our measurements, however, are exact. The height may be increased perhaps ten feet when the cables are made taut. They are five in number, twisted from the fibres of the _cabuya_, or maguey plant, and are about four inches thick. The floor is of small sticks and canes, fastened transversely with raw-hide strings. The Indians coming from Andahuaylas and other districts where the cabuya grows, generally bring a quant.i.ty of leaves with them wherewith to pay their toll. These are prepared and made into rope by the custodians of the bridge, who must be glad of some occupation in their lone and lofty eyrie.

Our baggage was carried over the bridge, and the animals were then led across one by one, loaded and started up the mountain. The s.p.a.ce is too limited to receive more than two loaded mules at a time, and instances are known of their having been toppled over the precipice from overcrowding. We led our horses over without difficulty except in getting them on the bridge. But once fairly on the swaying structure they were as composed as if moving on the solid ground. Perhaps even to the lowest animal intelligence it must be apparent that the centre of the bridge of the Apurimac is not the place for antics, equine or asinine.

Mounted once more, we commenced our steep and difficult ascent. At one place the sheer precipice presented itself on one side, and a vertical wall on the other; next it was a scramble up a ladder of stairs, partly cut in the rock and partly built up with stones against it; then a sudden turn, with a parapet built around it in a semi-circle, to prevent descending animals from being carried into the abyss below by their own momentum. Our cargo-mules toiled up painfully above us, stopping every few steps to breathe, while the muleteers braced themselves against their haunches to afford them some support and rest.