At rare intervals some eddying rift would be blown in the mists, and for a brief moment Mount Sorata would stand clear and sharp against the blue patch of sky, with its great white shoulder scarcely more than five miles away across a precipitous gorge. High above our world it seemed to rise, a titanic, bulking, cataclysmic mass, magnificent in its immensity. Enormous cliffs of snow towered above the scarred, black gorges of its flanks, glittering in the flash of momentary sunlight and iridescent in the purple shadows. High against its face clouds were born and were shredded in the blast of an unseen gale; now and again an avalanche of snow broke from some slope and was whirled in a feathery spray into the shadows of a gorge thousands of feet below. It could blanket a dozen villages, yet it was diminished on the tremendous slopes until it seemed no more than the tiny avalanche on a tin roof at home; before it can fall to the depths of the gorge a gale has caught it and it is blown in a stinging blizzard half way across the mountain’s face. Vertically, nearly two miles above the trail across the divide, rose the white fang of the summit, that has still defied all efforts at scaling; there, according to the AymarÁ belief, is the chief treasure of the god of the mountain, a great golden bull. The generous pantheism of the AymarÁ has given a similar golden treasure to the summit of Illomani back near La Paz, but in that case, in order that the balance of conflicting religions might be kept, it is a huge cross of gold.

The difficulties and inaccessibility of these mountains conveys, to the AymarÁ mind, the idea that they are inhabited by the most powerful and exclusive of the gods. That hint of exclusiveness is enough for them and only with the greatest difficulty have they been prevailed upon to accompany the few climbing expeditions, while weird stories still circulate among them as to the howling and malignant devils that ride the storms in the great gorges high up. The AymarÁ is already supplied with enough lesser deities that require continuous and troublesome propitiation so that he does not care to go out of his way up into Sorata and incur another, and possibly hostile and irritated theistic burden.

After the cairn that marks the divide is passed, the trail leads abruptly downward. At first it is a relief to lean back in the saddle and feel the strain come on the crupper while the breast-strap flaps loosely once more, but hour after hour of constant descent and the constant straining back in the saddle become more irksome and monotonous than was the leaning forward on the upward climb. The mists and cold rains blow in lighter patches and with a softer touch; even occasionally the deep valleys below can be seen marked out in irregular surfaces of soft green where the AymarÁ farms are budding. The descent is rapid; the pack-train coils about among the buttresses of the mountains along a broad shelf that is often cut into the steep slopes, and always plunging downward. We were almost below the line of clouds, and a few moments later they were drifting past just overhead, and there, far below us, stretched the deep, crooked valley of Sorata.

It was the very heart of the Andes. In the wedge-shaped channel of the tortuous valley a slender thread of white torrent narrowed and disappeared in the haze of depth and distance; the huge mountains swept upward like the sides of a great bowl, while delicately floating strata of fleecy clouds seemed to mark off and measure and then accent their enormous altitudes. Beyond and above them rose other peaks and the jagged fangs of interlocking mountain-ranges that formed this colossal Andean maze; there was no sense of distance; even the feeling of space seemed to be for the instant gone, and under the long, mellow rays of the afternoon sun, with this vast, shattered universe spread before us, it was as though we had been suddenly translated and left dizzy and bewildered in an opalescent infinity.

The AymarÁ huts that clung to the steep slopes with their little patches of corn were shrunk to miniature; the single bull plowing with a crooked tree-trunk was a diminutive bug, prodded along the furrow by a microscopic insect. All the air was filled with the low roar of cascades; every slope and valley was scarred with the slender, white threads of torrents from the melting snows above. Far ahead, where the buttress of a mountain projected like a hilly peninsula into the Sorata valley, a toy village of scarlet tile and thatched roofs was compactly lodged on the flattened crest. It was the village of Sorata, clinging like a lichen to a spur of the huge, overhanging mountain from which it takes its name.

Late in the afternoon, although the gorge had long since been cool in the shadows of the inclosing mountains, we crossed the old Spanish stone bridge that still spans the torrent of melted snows, where an ancient mill remains to testify to the enterprise of the early Spanish adventurers. A short climb up the steep promontory to the village, and we clattered over the paved streets and on into the patio of the sole posada, the old bell-mule leader trotting in with the easy familiarity of many previous trips.

The proprietress, a plump Cholo lady, made still plumper by the many skirts of her class, all worn at once, so that she swayed and undulated like an antebellum coquette, fluttered about in welcome. Her pink stockinged legs—the skirts come just below the knees—and fancy slashed satin shoes, with the highest of high French heels, teetered about the patio and over the rough floors, giving orders to a drunken AymarÁ cook and a small AymarÁ boy, who proved to be the chambermaid. Gracefully she joined in a bottle of stinging Chilean wine and bawled further orders for our comfort out into the shuffling kitchen. At supper we had soup—chicken soup, with the head and feet floating with the chalona and chuÑo. There followed a kind of melon, scooped out and loaded with raisins and scraps of pork and whatever other scraps and vegetables were at hand, blistered with aji, the fiercest and most venomous pepper known to man.