^ 1912 J Rhoads, Birds of the Paramo of Central Ecuador. 145 



"terror," or, at best, an eight hour "shiver," without even the 

 consolation of being frozen, for the mercury has the faculty of hover- 

 ing at about 32° to 34° by night during the centuries at this charmed 

 spot, nine miles below the Equator and two and a half miles above 

 the sea. Dry wood was "excessively rare" (as they say in auction 

 catalogs), and any kind of wood or grass or fuel, native to such a 

 region, or even imported into it, is so loath to burn in that rarefied 

 air, that we were lucky to even warm our beans and rice and choco- 

 late in time to "turn in" at 6.30. By dark the eternal snows 

 or rather sleet, began to fall and we were forced to "bunk up" 

 to keep warm. Did I say, "keep warm?" Well, we did not keep 

 warm, though we had enough on and about us to have withstood a 

 zero temperature at sea level in the same outfit. I began to realize 

 about ten o'clock that sleep was out of the question, so, between the 

 ague fits that periodically stole over my frame, I listened. There 

 was something doing that night. The moon behind the mists 

 and sleet was eerie, and Pichincha's black crater-wall almost over- 

 shadowed us. The thin and ghostly sides of our tiny tent pulsated 

 with the breeze, and I was vaguely reminded of that weird scene 

 of the Witches' Kitchen, in Macbeth. The futile attempts of my 

 companion a few hours before, to make the evening bean-pot boil, 

 lent color to this fancy. Suddenly I was conscious of a Pentecostal 

 sound, a rushing, mighty, but far distant, blast. It seemed to come 

 from the crater. Could it be an eruption? No, the crater was 

 extinct! And then, just as this thought consoled me, a deep 

 answering growl, like a defiant echo from the cliff above our camp, 

 sent thrills along my spinal marrow. Lemmon seemed to sleep, 

 so I had no companion to this new misery. An interval, a drowse, 

 and then another rehearsal of this unearthy carouse of the cliffs 

 awoke me. Then did I become conscious of notes high-pitched 

 and plaintive, a sort of tiny climax or tintinabulation, coming from 

 the tussock-dotted arena around the camp. In the long hours 

 which marked this dismal chorus I thought a thousand solutions 

 for it. The crater and its possibilities figured in all ; the answering 

 growls and roars were those of ranging Mountain Lions on the 

 high slopes and the final treble came, mayhap, from a watchful 

 brown-breasted Flycatcher, Myiotheretes erythropygius (Scl.), whose 

 mate I had shot the day before, above the nearby spring. When 



