We travelled this day pretty smartly, having rested at noon about two hours, as before, and, by my calculation, went about twenty-two English miles in all. About five o'clock in the afternoon, we came into a broad, plain open place, where, though it was not properly a valley, yet we found it lay very level for a good way together, our way lying almost east-south-east. After we had marched so about two miles, I found the way go evidently down hill, and, in half a mile more, to our singular satisfaction we found the water from the mountains ran plainly eastward, and, consequently, to the North Sea. We saw at a distance several huts or houses of the mountaineer inhabitants, but went near none of them, but kept on our way, going down two or three pretty steep places, not at all dangerous, though something difficult. We encamped again the next night as before, and still our good caterer had plenty of food for us; but I observed that the next morning, when we set forward, our tents were left standing, the baggage mules tied together to graze, and our company lessened by all my patron's servants, which, when I inquired about, he told me he hoped we should have good quarters quickly without them. I did not understand him for the present, but it unriddled itself soon after; for, though we travelled four days more in that narrow way, yet he always found us lodging at the cottages of the mountaineers. The sixth day we went all day up hill; at last, on a sudden, the way turned short east, and opened into a vast wide country, boundless to the eye every way, and delivered us entirely from the mountains of the Andes, in which we had wandered so long. Any one may guess what an agreeable surprise this was to us, to whom it was the main end of our travels. We made no question that this was the open country extending to the North, or Atlantic Ocean; but how far it was thither, or what inhabitants it was possessed by, what travelling, what provisions to be found by the way, what rivers to pass, and whether any navigable or not, this our patron himself could not tell us one word of, owning frankly to us, that he had never been one step farther than the place where we then stood, and that he had been there only once, to satisfy his curiosity, as I did now.