392 TRAVELS AMONGST THE GREAT ANDES, chap, xx, 



have prevented this volume from appearing earlier ; and I much 

 regret that its publication comes too late to benefit my right-hand 

 man and trusted assistant, Jean-Antoine Carrel. In the higher 

 regions, we were at constant war with the elements ; and, in com- 

 parison with what he and his cousin endured, hard-labour on a 

 treadmill would have been pleasurable, and rest in a casual ward 

 would have been luxury. They derived no advantage from the 

 journey except their hard-earned pay, and I had hoped that this 

 relation of it might have procured for them some recognition of 

 their indefatigable industry in the service of science. Men of 

 their class are indispensable to a worker in elevated regions. They 

 have been so in the past, and they will be in the future ; and, if it 

 cannot be done as an act of justice, upon the lower ground of 

 policy it would be expedient sometimes to acknowledge their 

 exceptional, unrewarded services.^ 



No commiseration need be entertained for myself. The enter- 

 prize was my own seeking, and a traveller should be prepared to 

 take the sours with the sweets. More than twenty years have 

 passed since I drew out the plan of a journey amongst the Great 

 Andes of the Equator. Engrossed by my work, the time has fled ; 

 and now that the toil is over the labour is forgotten, — an instant 

 bridges the interval ; and it seems less like a project which has 

 been accomplished than a Dream that has yet to be realized. 



1 Through the sudden death of Jean-Antoine Carrel in 1890, some of the 

 members of his family were left in straitened circumstances. Upon this being 

 brought to the notice of the Royal Geographical Society by Mr. Douglas W. Fresh- 

 field, the Council granted the sum of £21 towards a Fund which was being raised 

 by the Daily Graphic for the relief of those who were in need ; and enhanced the 

 value of the donation by a letter, from which the following paragraph is extracted. 

 "The Council do not, as a rule, consider it within their province to contribute to 

 Funds of this nature. But they have resolved to make an exception in the present 

 case in order emphatically to mark their appreciation of the high services rendered 

 to geographical science by the late J. -A. Carrel. . . by transporting delicate instru- 

 ments to great heights with such care that on yout return to England they proved 

 to have suffered no injury whatever." 



