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gorge, with bare mountain walls standing precipitously more than a thousand feet above on each side, while below the river hurried noisily between its rock faces. On the inaccessible bank on the opposite side of the impetuous stream were scores of ancient terraces where a bygone race had prepared for cultivation every available inch of the mountain-slope.

Hourly it grew more perfect summer, and ever more magnificent vistas broke unexpectedly upon us, contrasting with the bleak, bare, wind-swept heights of the day before. The old trail from Cuzco to the tropical montaña climbed sulkily away up a side quebrada, or ravine, toward the dreary uplands. This new road to Santa Ana had made accessible for the first time in modern days this marvelous cañon of the Urubamba. It was nowhere steep. We went down by frequent little stony descents, with no corresponding rises, half aware now and then of standing in our stirrups as the animal dropped from under us, the conscious self gazing at the enthralling scene about and above us. A condor sailing majestically on motionless wings above the mountain wall looked like a sparrow, mingled with the light clouds that flecked the transparent sky of the plateau above.

We met frequent pack-trains bound upward out of the tropics with cargoes of the fiery native aguardiente, in leather skins inside cloth-wrapped wooden frames, or long cylindrical packages of coca-leaves such as the drivers were chewing. The meetings were sometimes at points where we had to take care not to be pushed over the impending precipice into the river; for though our right of way gave us the mountain-side, the pack-animals, shy of the roaring stream below, tried to crowd. in between us and the wall despite the threatening cries and whistling of their arrieros.

At eleven we stopped for breakfast. Then deeper and ever deeper we descended into the fastnesses of the Andes, with the vegetation becoming markedly tropical. The solid granite precipices, rising sheer thousands of feet from the foaming rapids to the clouds, remained at the same height, but the river cañon continued to descend, and gave us the curious effect of seeming to see the mountains that shut us in rising ever higher into the sky. The approach of the vast tropical lowlands was heralded by single trees, then by whole forests climbing the lower flanks. of the mountains, then clothing the tops of the ridges and the lower mountains, in

delightful contrast to the dreary treelessness of the upper heights. Jungle shrubs and undergrowth sprang up about us. Moss and tropical herbage took to draping the moist rocks and boulders until even the perpendicular face of the mountain beside and above us clothed itself in lush-green vegetation. The song of the jungle rose on all sides, the rampant vegetation clutched playfully at us along the way. Ferns, the first I had seen in months, appeared, and quickly grew to their gigantic tropical forms. Orchids were plentiful, and other flowers of brilliant colors. A soft wind blew caressingly, and upon us fell that lazy, contented mood that always follows a descent from the cold, nerve-straining páramo.

The cañon of the Urubamba had shrunk to a resounding gorge of sharp V-shape, with virtually no room left for cultivation, so that even the hardy andenes, or cultivated shelves, of the Incas were crowded out of existence, and only the imperious river forced its way through the mountains, permitting the narrow road to follow on the precarious foothold blasted for it along one of the towering granite walls. We began to meet yellow, fever-eyed walking skeletons straggling languidly up from the tropical valleys. These increased until all the few travelers were sallow-skinned and hollow-eyed and of a hopeless cast of countenance.

Toward four the beautiful, jagged peak of Huaina Picchu came into sight down the winding cañon, puffs of white clouds. hovering about it, and we knew we were approaching our goal. But things moved now with tropical languor. In places the road became a stony stairway down which we must pick our way step by step; in places it was pieced together with slivers of rock to keep it from falling sheer into the angry stream. The mountain squeezed the trail to the extreme edge, so that an unwary horseman, gazing at the riches of nature about him, was not infrequently rapped on the head by jagged points of rock left by the dynamite of the trailbuilders. Tropical birds of beautiful plumage flitted in and out of the impene

trable undergrowth. The pungent, deathsuggesting, yet enticing, smells of the tropics filled our nostrils. The sun abandoned us early, and left us with the sense of being down in some great well dreamily wondering whether we should ever again reach the great broad world above.

Dusk was falling when the road wandered out upon a bit of flat meadow squeezed between the mountain wall and the now calmer river, facing the breakneck slopes of Huaina Picchu. This was Mandorpampa. A grass-thatched hut on poles served as tambo, or inn. As we hung our alforjas, or saddle-bags, over the unhewn beams an unattractive half-breed, scented with fire-water, appeared from his adjoining hut. He it was who had first guided los Americanos to the then junglehidden Machu Picchu. He had long known of the ruins, as had other natives, but had never considered them extensive or important. Indeed, he seemed still to have a distinctly low opinion of them as "cosas de los Gentiles" ("things of the Gentiles"), not to be compared with the Cathedral of Cuzco, with its tin saints and tinseled virgins. He promised to climb to them with us in the morning for a consideration, and we prepared to pass the heavy, humming tropical night.

The humid darkness was showing signs. of fading when I woke the professor from a night during which, by his own testimony, he had not slept a wink. The cause was not lack of comfort, for the professor is an experienced man of the woods, but a great mental anguish. An insect had stung him on a knuckle. Now, the professor had just come from his investigations among the victims of that dread disease of the Andes known at uta, from the Quichua word to rot, which, beginning in just such an insect bite, eats away the sufferer's flesh until he is hurried at breakneck speed into the grave. Naturally he wanted our earnest examination and experienced opinion by first morning light whether we should, after all, climb to Machu Picchu or hurry back to Cuzco to call a conference of the medical wiseacres. I examined the bite solici

tously. There was no doubt that it was only the preliminary nibble of the myriad insects that would have fallen upon us in earnest and tattooed us into the strange patterns I had already often worn had we descended another five thousand feet into the real tropics. But one cannot put things thus cruelly and crudely to one weighed down by the intangible dread of the subtle, pest-infested tropics from which no man is free upon his first descent into them. But hav

ing between us convinced the professor that he would in all probability

outlive

the day, by fog-bound six we were off.

The lover of ardent waters had concluded that he could not possibly get his various activities in shape to accompany us before eight, and we concluded to hobble along without his historical assistance. We paid him two

in his cheek, chopping the boulder-imbedded roadway higher back under the edge of the cliff for flood-time. The foreman offered us carriers. None of his men was large; beside the professor the impassive fellows approached dwarfishness, and I uttered a protest when Martinelli care

lessly waved a thumb at by no means the largest. But my fancied equality to the human freight-trains of the Andes oozed away as suddenly as the rotundity of a pricked wine-skin.

When the Indian had

swung upon his back the burden I had been staggering under on

a level roadway, Martinelli nonchalantly tossed his twenty-five pounds on top of it. A bit farther on that unfeeling savage paused at one of the pole-and-leaf shelters of the workmen under the edge of the impending cliff and added a pair of blankets, a coca-bag, and several other personal odds and ends, then waltzed away as lightly as a prairie chicken under its tail-feathers, faster than we cared to follow.

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"Scores of stairways"

sols to keep the animals well fed and, lest the matter slip his mind, left Tomas with him as a perpetual reminder. This left us well burdened with our "beds" and the supplies necessary to pass the night, for I would not hear to the plan of paying the place only a flying visit. Being the only one in Andine training, I volunteered to carry the surplus and, bowed under a bulky sixty-five pounds held by a llama-hair rope across my chest, like any Indian cargador, led the way back along the road, planning to boast forever after of being the equal of any aboriginal burden-bearer of the Andes. Barely had I reconciled myself to the perpendicular climb in store for us under such a load, however, when we came upon a gang of Indians, each with a coca cud

Perhaps two miles back a hidden path plunged swiftly down through the wet, clinging jungle to the sapling bridge that hung precariously from rock to boulder across the river. Beyond the stream, which snatched impotently at us as we passed, sagging, a perpendicular mountainside, dense with jungle, stared impassively down upon us. But when we had tripped some distance over the rocks and jagged boulders tumbled along the edge of the savage torrent, a hole in the undergrowth like the lair of some wild animal proved to be the beginning of a trail now overgrown almost to nothing.

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The first mile up was through the densest wet jungle. This, according to native report, was notorious for its venomous snakes, particularly a little teninch vibora. Gradually the jungle gave way to a lighter stunted growth in which the sun blazed down mercilessly. Up the all but sheer face of this the trail sweated in sharp zigzags. Dry-tongued with thirst, we came, after more than an hour above the river, to a patch of shade on an almost level shelf of the mountain. In it grew a "Spanish tomato," shaped like a huge strawberry, of a double acidity that throttled our thirst for the moment. Some what higher we found ourselves mounting ancient agricultural terraces. These were walls of rough stone head high that sustained level spaces of like width. Far from being under cultivation, the rich, black soil of these artificial mountain shelves nourished an all but impassable tangle of new jungle growth, and the trunks of great trees that had been felled and charred over cut us off in many directions. By working our way laboriously back and forth and gradually mounting several terraces, now by a canted treetrunk, now by the four projecting stones set stair-like in the faces of the walls

by which the prehistoric husbandmen mounted and descended, we found a terrace along which we could tear our way, and came out at last, nearly two hours up, on the sheer edge of it. Machu Picchu lay before us.

My first impression was tinged with disappointment. Aside from the general experience of finding a long-heralded scene striking in inverse ratio to the length of time the imagination has fed upon it, my mental picture of a city seemed to call for sky-scrapers crowded over a vast area that could be bound closely together only by a rapid-transit system. Measured by these subconscious standards, the town the Incas or their predecessors had left here in the beautiful fastnesses of the Urubamba was small. At least it had been our good fortune to catch the first sight of it from a splendid point of vantage. Well below us and across a considerable gully, the abandoned city lay spread out in all its white granite brilliancy under the gorgeous Andine sunshine; and if all the town could not be included in a view from this point or any other, that view included all the finer buildings and left out chiefly the extensive andenes and the third-class houses of

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those who lived on and worked them. Though roofless, it was a complete city in so fine a state of preservation that the beholder felt like one of the old Spanish conquistadores in those enviable years when there were still new worlds to discover. On a gigantic scale its site was that of an ancient feudal castle. A mountain ridge defended by Nature in one of her most solitary moods and including within its confines the steeple-pointed peak of Huaina Picchu fell away on every side by tremendous precipices into the fearful. void of the Urubamba, a sheer unbroken two thousand feet to the thread-like river that makes a three-fourths circle around it; while beyond, pregnant with the mystery of impassable jungle and of a bygone race, lay a wonderful wilderness of Andine ranges, shaggy with dense forest, pitched and tumbled and fading away in the blue-black of unfathomable distance.

Machu Picchu was indeed a city of refuge. There is no need of Incaic lore. and the furrowed brow of the archæologist to be certain of that. Only men scared beyond the functioning of gooseflesh could have scurried away into this most inaccessible nook of the Andes and scrambled up these appalling cliffs to es

cape their pursuers, only men to whom labor was as nothing compared with the fear of bodily violence would have toiled a century fitting together these gigantic rocks and boulders rather than sally forth to take their chances against the slings or poisoned arrows of their enemies. The slinking, hare-hearted Cuzco Indian of to-day may easily be their lineal descendant.

Effectively defended by nature though they were, these champions of precaution left no loopholes. In the gully between where we sat and the city they had thrown two massive stone walls from one sheer precipice to another. Outside this were most of the agricultural terraces, for within the city proper was scant space for cultivation, and in case of attack the peasants no doubt abandoned their fields and raced to town. Between these two walls lay a dry moat, deep and wide, while at the city gate the wall was constructed on the "salient" system of Sacsahuaman and so many of the pre-Columbian ruins down the crest of the Andes, so that while a besieger was gently knocking for admittance a member of the goose-flesh clan could stroll out on the wall above and drop a boulder on his astonished head.

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