With the World's Great Travellers Volume Ii Part 17

We had scarcely reached half-way to the mouth of the tunnel, which enters the mountain at the base of a vast vertical ma.s.s of rock, when our attention was arrested by the shouts of our men and a commotion among the animals above us. It was occasioned by a descending train of loaded mules, just plunging out of the black throat of the tunnel. The mountain mule always seeks to take the wall of the animal it meets, being perfectly aware of the danger of trying to pa.s.s on the outer side of the pathway; and it sometimes happens that neither will give way under any amount of persuasion or blows. The muleteers have to unload the animals, which may then be got past each other. A similar difficulty occurred now, and the conductor of the advancing train hurried down to warn us to dismount and seek the widest part of the path, or some nook by its side, and there await the pa.s.sage of his mules. He had hardly done speaking when we saw one of our own mules, loaded with our trunks, come plunging down the narrow zigzagging way, evidently in fright, followed wildly by its driver. Just before reaching the place where we stood, the animal fell, going literally heels over head, and would have been carried over the little platform of rock into the river had not the master of the descending train caught the falling mule by its foreleg, and in this way saved it from tumbling over. He at once placed his whole weight on its ears, thus preventing it from struggling, and thus obviating its destruction, while we detached its cargo. A foot farther, and the mule would inevitably have been lost.

It was with no little satisfaction that we saw the last mule of the train pa.s.s us, and resumed our ascent. We found the tunnel a roomy one, two or three hundred yards in length, with openings from the face of the precipice for the admission of light and air. Through these we caught brief glimpses of the grand and solemn mountains on the opposite side of the canon, and through them came in also, hoa.r.s.e and sullen, the deep voice of the river. I am uncertain as to how far this tunnel may be ascribed to the Incas, but feel sure that their bridge across the Apurimac was at precisely the same point with the present one. We were fully two hours in ascending the steeps, and reached the high mountain-circled plain in which stands the straggling town of Curahuasi, a well-watered village buried among trees and shrubbery.