REFLECTIONS. 261 



The heavens also present a peculiar character of " mild 

 effulgence and repose." * That we knew was our last 

 sunset view in the valley of Quito, for the follovs'ing day 

 we were to climb to the crest of the cordillera, and 

 commence our descent to the Amazons. Perhaps it was 

 this thought that led us to sit longer than usual in 

 the chill evening air, while the shadows of the West- 

 ern Cordillera grew longer and deeper upon the plain 

 below. Slowly the light faded away from the great hills, 

 till the snowy peaks stood in ghostly paleness about us. 

 As w^e watched the shades of night stealing over that 

 A'alley, once the favorite home of the Incas, was it strange 

 that our reveries carried us back to the past, and we 

 were viewing another scene — watching the light of the 

 empire of the " Children of the Sun " dying away from 

 those same hills, and the chill and darkness of a spiritual 

 night falling upon them ? With what feelings of unde- 

 fined sadness is the history of the Incas always recalled, 

 since the pen of Prescott has invested their strange story 

 with so romantic an interest ! The ruins of their works 

 now lie scattered upon the sierras or throughout the val- 



* Humboldt, in speaking of the aspect of the heavens viewed from the 

 table-lands of Peru, says : " On an average the fixed stars appear only to 

 scintillate when less than 10° or 12° above the horizon. At great eleva- 

 tions they shed a mild, planetary light." This observer refers the phe- 

 nomenon of scintillation to " luminous interferences," caused by the 

 rays of light passing through strata of air of unequal density. In the 

 tropics the atmosphere is more uniform as respects distribution of heat 

 and humidity, consequently the twinkling of the stars is less observable. 

 If, now, in that uniform atmosphere, we take our position upon the lofty 

 plateaux of the Andes, thus placing more than a third (by weight) of the 

 atmosphere beneath us, we can readily perceive why the stars should pre- 

 sent that planetary appearance. The same authority, whose views we 

 are presenting, in speaking of planets, observes : " The absence of scin- 

 tillation in planets with larger disks is to be ascribed to compensation 

 and to the neutralizing mixture of colors proceeding from different 

 points cf the disk." See " Cosmos," vol. iii., pp. 99, 101. 



