RETUllK TO MENDOZA. 



times shaking his head and pulling with his beak, 

 and sometimes pushing with his leg. 



Got to Mendoza, and went to bed. Wakened by- 

 one of m J party who arrived: he told me, that 

 seeing the condors hovering in the air, and knowing 

 that several of them would be gorged *, he had also 

 ridden up to- the dead horse, and that as one of 

 these enormous birds flew about fifty yards off, and 

 was unable to go any farther, he rode up to him, 

 and then, jumping off his horse, seized him by the 

 neck. The contest was extraordinary, and the 

 rencontre unexpected. No two animals can well be 

 imagined less likely to meet than a Cornish miner 

 and a condor, and few could have calculated, a year 

 ago, when the one was hovering high above the 

 snowy pinnacles of the Cordillera, and the other 



* Tlie manner in wliich the Gauchos catch these bu-ds is to 

 kill a horse and skin him; and they say that, although not a 

 condor is to be seen, the smell instantly attracts them. "When 

 I was at one of the mines in Chili, I idly mentioned to a person 

 that I should like to have a condor: some days afterwards a 

 Gaucho arrived at Santiago from this person with three large 

 ones. They had all been caught in this manner, and had been 

 hung over a horse ; two had died of galloping, but the other 

 was alive. I gave the Gaucho a dollar, who immediately left 

 me to consider \^hat I could do with three such enormous birds. 



