Mountain Journeys 23 



reached the road from Cuzco to Quito at a point south of Ambato; 

 it is evident then that he crossed the Andes near Chimborazo. He 

 must have ascended to an altitude of more than 4800 meters, since 

 he was in the midst of snows; the sufferings of his army were 

 terrible: 



There died (according to Herrera) fifteen Spaniards and six women, 

 several negroes and two thousand Indians. When they issued from the 

 snow, their faces were death-like. Several Indians who escaped lost 

 their toes and even their feet; some were blind. 



The great expedition of Don Diego d'Almargo, in the conquest 

 of Chile, had still more terrible results. Leaving Cuzco in 1535, he 

 tried to cross the mountain, in spite of his captains. The Inca Gar- 

 cilasso de la Vega 3 has given a touching account of the sufferings 

 of the army. 



As the land they entered was so wild, suffering soon resulted: for 

 a few days after, they found strange obstacles in the road they took. 

 The first was that they could not walk on account of the snow . . . the 

 second, that food began to fail . . . and the third, that, according to the 

 calculation of the cosmographers and the astrologers, since the moun- 

 tains raised their summits into the middle regions of the air, the tem- 

 perature was so low, because everything there is covered with snow, 

 particularly in such a season as our adventurers had chosen, namely, 

 winter when the days are the shortest and coldest of the year, that 

 many Spaniards, Negroes, Indians, and horses were frozen and be- 

 numbed. But the Indians, though lightly clad, had the best of it. 

 Of the 15,000 of them, morethan 10,000 died and more than 150 of the 

 .Spaniards , . . . 



It was probably in the lofty regions of Tacora, on the road be- 

 tween La Paz and Arica, that this expedition took place, so un- 

 fortunately undertaken in the middle of the southern winter. 



In 1541, i shortly after the death of Pizarro, four Spaniards, who 

 were part of an expedition which had left Asuncion at the order 

 of Irala, went to Lima, passing by Potosi and Cuzco. An envoy of 

 the governor of Peru had made the same journey; "Miguel Ruedo 

 and Ahaic were so exhausted by the hardships of the journey," 

 says Ulrich Schmidel, who accompanied the expedition, "that they 

 were obliged to stop at Potosi" (page 222) . 



These accounts, as we see, give as explanation of the sufferings 

 and disasters only fatigue, lack of food, and cold. The Jesuit 

 father Acosta, 5 who travelled in South America about the end of 

 the sixteenth century, was the first to note the special distress due 

 to a special cause, the air of lofty places. Let us add that he gave 

 a striking description of it. 



