It looked reasonable; there was no dissent. We swung around a curve and a vista opened out of a ragged valley, broken by gorges and caÑons with sheer walls of soft rock.

One of the other engineers chuckled. “Look at that!” He pointed up the valley and his finger followed one of the caÑons. “How did they cut and try on that proposition?”

There, for as far as the eye could follow the turnings of the caÑon way was the line of a ditch, an aqueduct, that hung some twenty to fifty feet below the edge of the cliff. It had been cut into the wall of rock, leaving a lip along the outer edge to hold in the current. Here and there, where the ragged trace of the caÑon made projecting, buttressing angles, the aqueduct had been driven as a short-cut tunnel straight through. Here and there great sections of the caÑon walls had fallen, while occasionally it appeared as though the outer lip had been destroyed by man-made efforts—one of the old Spanish methods of hurrying up a little ready tribute—but never had there been a possibility of using any “cut and try” method of its construction.

“Well,” remarked the first, “there goes that theory—and it isn’t original with me either—for I reckon they had to run that level first and chalk it up on the rock to cut by in some kind of a way.”

It is a trifle staggering, when you think of it, that a nation that was able to solve engineering difficulties like these, to turn an arid desert into a teeming farm and to organize and administer a vast empire, should have been wantonly destroyed all for the lack of a little knowledge of the combination of saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal. And the wretched waste! Think of that church-benisoned riffraff of the medieval slums, recognizing only the greed for raw gold, wasting a whole people in torture to satisfy the rapacious gluttony of a Spanish court.

Sometimes the train crawled along no faster than a bare walk, so steep were the grades and sharp the turns. There was nothing of the scenic splendor such as one may get in the railroads among the Alps of Switzerland and where, as one climbs, one may look down and back into the green landscape of a panorama. The scale was too great, the sense of proportion and distance was subdued; a stretch great enough for a Swiss panorama was one vast gorge twisting its way among the vaster masses of the Andes. The crest of the pass itself was higher than Mount Rainier.

Sometimes the train passed over high plateaus where occasionally in the distance could be seen the low house of some hacienda or the grouped huts of Indians while beyond in the great distance the plain was rimmed with a jagged line of snow-capped peaks. The winds swept across the level stretches, raising an assortment of sand-spouts and dusty cyclones. They were of all sizes, from tiny remolinos that died in a few puffs to towering whirlwinds that spiraled fifteen hundred feet in the air with a base of fifty feet that juggled boulders in its vortex like so many cork chips. They would move leisurely for a short space and then dart like a flash in an erratic path. Sometimes fifteen or twenty of these would be in sight at the same time. Herds of llamas grazed over the plain, sometimes a flock of sheep or an occasional horse, each with a wary eye on the whirlwinds; if one approached too near they galloped off. Not infrequently a herd of guanacos would gallop off at the approach of the train or could be seen grazing in the distance.

From beyond the high plain the grades lessened and the train rolled along at a fine speed—for South America. At rare intervals there was a station and a short stop, usually the lonely outpost of some mining company. Then the grades began to slope our way and in place of the dry bunch grass there were rolling hills and gentle valleys of soft green grass. Little lakes nestled in the hills, their cold waters black with wildfowl that scarcely fluttered up as the train shot by. We were making the slight drop down to that vast inter-Andean plateau that stretches from Bolivia on up into Ecuador.

A cold winter sunset sank beyond the cold purple of the western peaks; a couple of feeble, smoking and smelling oil lamps irritated the darkness and added their fragrance to the close atmosphere—for in the bitter winds and biting cold of the high altitude the windows had long since been closed.

Juliaca was reached, a junction by which one may connect for Cuzco, the old Inca capital. It showed in the blackness as a few dingy lights. Here the car emptied itself of all but half a dozen bound for Bolivia across the lake. Once again we wheezed under way and presently with a grand celebration from the engine’s whistle the train pulled slowly into the train yards of the terminal at Puno and as we climbed out there came the light, musical splash of freshwater surf and the unmistakable smell of water. Dimly under the starlight there loomed the form of a boat and the dim reflecting surface of the water was picked out by the dark patches of the native Indian craft. It was the great Lake Titicaca.

Down at the end of the stone dock lay the Yavari a slim, patched boat, twice lengthened, whose hull and engines had been packed piecemeal on the backs of burros, llamas, and mules over the Andes to the Titicaca shores over fifty years ago. It had taken a year to do it. It was the first steamer on the lake and wonderful was the amazement of the native population as they beheld this veritable monster of the seas—some sixty feet in length—shoot mysteriously through the water at the prodigious speed of some seven miles an hour.

Forward, on either side, was an array of tiny staterooms, each about the size of a wardrobe into which penetrated a most grateful warmth from the boilers. A scrap of tallow candle threw the suspicious looking bunks into shadow and it was not long before I was in one under my own blankets. From the little cabin aft came the clatter of the native travelers over a late lunch served by a bare-legged Quechua sailor; it was in the main some kind of a hash preparation loaded with aji, a venomous pepper that will penetrate the stoutest stomach. I had tried it and having been both warned and punished in the same mouthful, I was glad to seek the wardrobe bunk to weep it out of my system in cramped solitude.

In the first streaks of dawn the Yavari backed out from the long dock and swung out upon the crystal-clear, blue waters of Lake Titicaca. On the other side of the dock at a disabled angle and under repairs lay the more pretentious steamer Coya—literally the Inca Queen—with diminutive bridge and chart-house and all the trappings of a deep sea liner shrunk and crowded into small compass. Varieties of water fowl dotted the water’s edge in large flocks busily at breakfast and almost indifferent to the occasional straw or rather reed canoe of the Indians.

All day the Yavari skirted a coast that rolled back in long hills or at times came down to the lake in a steep bluff. Very slowly the lake is receding. Old Inca towns once evidently on the shore line are back from the water; since Pizarro’s time the distance is a matter of miles. In the little party on the boat the old tales of the Inca gold and Atahualpa’s tribute became naturally a leading topic. The country from the highlands of Colombia down to Chile are filled with legends of secreted treasure and lost mines or caches, for Pizarro did not wait for Atahualpa to pay his ransom—he burned him at the stake when he realized that the Inca emperor could actually get together a council chamber packed to the ceiling with raw gold.

There were scores of llama trains coming down the Andes from the uttermost parts of the empire, a veritable flood of gold was on its way to secure the release of the sacred Inca chief. It never arrived and somewhere up and down some three thousand miles of Andes there are legends galore of Inca tribute treasure concealed by the Indians on the burning of their king. There are legends of monkish parchment maps left by early missionaries that locate rediscoveries with apparent exactness up to certain points, of mines relocated by accident; in one case, a drunken Scotch donkey-engine driver took up and finally married a wretched AymarÁ mine-woman, a half-human creature; she finally revealed to him the location of one of the old concealed mines and the two worked it together. As the story runs, they acquired fabulous wealth, he longed for Scotland and went back taking her with him and importing for her use the chuno and chalona that was her only food. He played fair. Finally he died there and his widow managed to get back to her own mountains where she was finally poisoned for her money or her secret.

Legend also has it that around the city of Cuzco—the seat of the Incas—there was a great golden chain and that this, upon the approach of Pizarro, was dropped into Titicaca. It is always a steamer discussion as to how soon the lake will have receded enough to make its discovery a matter of possibility. At the possible place where it was dropped in the engineer of the Coya holds that the lake has receded some six miles since the conquest.

There is also the legend of the immense treasure train coming down in sections from what is now Colombia and Ecuador which was on the mountain trails at the time of Atahualpa’s death; evidence is said to exist of the despatch of this gold which would have more than completed the ransom. It never arrived, it was never heard of again after the burning at the stake, but it is a common belief to-day that there are many Indians to whom these matters are tribal secrets. There are common tales of odd Indians, neither Quechua nor AymarÁ, those being the two great Indian divisions, suddenly appearing from time to time and taking part in some Indian fiesta of peculiar importance, although evidently all the fiestas now have been given an ecclesiastical significance—and then as completely disappearing. There are rumors of tribes and even cities buried in the eastern slopes of the Andes from which these irregular excursions come.

Skirting the shore until the late afternoon, the Yavari struck out into the ocean horizon that stretched away in the blue distance, until we raised the Island of the Sun and the Island of the Moon. The former is reputed to have been the summer residence of the Incas and there still remain the ruins of palaces together with a great basin or reservoir hewn from the solid rock and traditionally known as the Inca’s bath tub. To the other island is ascribed the home of the wives and concubines of the Incas, or perhaps a training school where they were domiciled until, like an army reserve, they were called to the colors.

From each of them the Yavari took on a little freight, a few sacks of cebada, barley, and chuÑo, the little, dried up, original, native American potato, not much larger than a nutmeg. The cargo was on board a heavy, sluggish reed boat, a big affair in which burros and even bullocks are carried to or from these lake islands—of which there are many scattered here and there—and the mainland.

All the western slopes of the Andes are treeless, the high plains are treeless, and the few poles that are used in the thatched roofs of the Indian huts are dragged out from the montaÑa, as the interior over the final Andean passes is called. These skinny little poles are regular articles of trade. Therefore, the Lake Titicaca Indian has evolved his reed canoe and boat.

The reed, which grows along the shores of the lake, is bound in round bundles tapering at both ends; these bundles in turn are lashed together to form the canoes, from the little bundles to the larger boats that can carry freight. Sometimes a mat sail, also from these same reeds, is hoisted on a couple of poles lashed together at the apex and at the base braced against the inside of the clumsy craft. The steering is done with an oar made from a pole and a board, while similar oars are used by the crew who drive a wooden pin for an oarlock at any convenient spot along the reed-bundle gunwale. In this kind of an outfit they put out on the lake fishing for the little fish that alone seem to have survived in the cold waters, or shuffling across the waves from the coast to one little sugar-loaf island after another in their native trade. In Pizarro’s day it was probably the same—costume, craft, and barter.