14 



speaking the same language as in the old days of power, telling 

 the same wild legends, retaining the same religion, — just var- 

 nished over with a little Christianity. 



Finding the northern face of the mountains impossible. Sir 

 Martin Conway took up his headquarters at the town of La Paz, 

 fi'om which he set out to climb Sorata and Illimani. Mules 

 could be employed to a height of about 14,000 feet, after which 

 the baggage had to be carried on the backs of men, while in 

 the actual snowy region itself they had to do with very little 



Incidentally the Lecturer mentioned that all this mountain 

 region was rich in mineral deposits, though these were as yet 

 little worked, in consequence of the lack of fuel and the difficulty 

 of getting at them. Of one place, where an American Company 

 had taken possession of a "basin" in the rocky valley, he 

 showed photographs. Down the basin ran a mountain stream, 

 and the sides of the basin were rocky walls, towering hundreds 

 of feet. All the Company's machinery had to come down a 

 narrow path, over whose precipitous edge the sure-footed mules 

 would sometimes slip and fall, bouncing from boulder to boulder, 

 till they crashed, broken and bleeding, on the basin bed far 

 below. High up above in the mountain they had cut a canal 

 between two mountain streams, and from the canal to the basin 

 below had run an iron pipe, four feet in diameter at the top, 

 diminishing gradually to an orifice at the bottom eight inches in 

 diameter. Through this orifice, which could be turned in different 

 directions, the tremendous downward pressure of gravity exerted, 

 through the water, a force equivalent to some 8,000 horse-power, 

 and by this means the bed of the stream was washed through 

 sluices. When all the basin had thus been worked, the place 

 would be abandoned, and the wall would remain, for perhaps 

 thousands of years, " a monument to the interest the people of 

 the 19th century have taken in finding gold." 



On the long laborious journey up, the adventurers came to 

 a spot when it seemed as though hopes of winning the principal 

 peak must be abandoned, for the great snow-field that led up to 

 the highest point of the mountain ended in long walls of ice 

 that hung over like the end of a spread table-cloth. To 

 approach beneath this ice was to court annihilation, for ever 

 and anon vast masses would fall crashing from the heights, 

 shivering upon the rocks and precipices, and bounding off down 

 the mountain's flanks in great avalanches of ice that broke into 

 ever smaller pieces till it became a fine dust. At last they heard 

 of a valley by which they could mount higher, and for several 

 days pursued their way up a drift of loose rocks, similar, in the 

 photograph, to those that strew the upper portions of the Welsh 

 hills. They had now reached uninhabited regions, and the 



