In close proximity to these splendid ruins, sometimes under their very walls, our author found rude circles of stone, such as still exist at Stonehenge and in other parts of Great Britain, and in Brittany. Bidding adieu to Cuzco and its suggestive relics, Mr Squier in his journey to the coast passed over a stupendously high swinging bridge formed of cables of braided withes. This dreadful rope-edifice swung freely in space between two gigantic cliffs, which guarded like twin sentinels the rush of the deep and rapid Apurimac, one of the head-waters of the Amazon. It was something worse than the most breakneck defile among the Cordilleras. 'Never,' says our author, 'will I forget this experience. I can see still the frail structure swaying at dizzy height over a dark abyss filled with the deep hoarse roar of the river. My eyes grew dim, my heart faint, my feet unsteady as I struggled across, not daring to cast a look on either hand.' It was no wonder that the nerves of one of the party, an artist, were so shaken that he declared that rather than set a foot upon it, he would swim across the Apurimac. This he did, and found the water so delightfully cool and pleasant, that he resolved to prolong his bath, and placed the bundle containing his clothes and shoes on a convenient cliff, whence a perverse gust of wind blew them into the water. Long he pursued them, with no result except the conviction that he had lost them irrecoverably and his way as well. In this condition, foodless, garmentless, he wandered about for three days in pathless thickets. His feet were cut and bleeding; and his body, scratched and torn, was scorched all day by a blistering sun, and so chilled at night by the cold breezes that he was glad to bury himself in the warm sand. On the fourth day he staggered, faint with fatigue and hunger, to the door of an Indian hut, and the inhabitants mistaking him in his ghastly squalor for the incarnate genius of fever, which they dread above all things, half killed with stones what little life was left in him before they would listen to his story.