No effect could seem finer, to wanderers from another latitude, than this first night-bivouac in the absolute wilderness. The moon, seeming to race through the clouds, and the camp-fire flashing in the wind, appeared to give movement and animation to the landscape. The Indians, grouped around the flame, seemed like swarthy imps tending the furnace of some fantastic pandemonium. Meanwhile, amidst the constant murmurs of the trees, the nephew of Aragon was heard drawing the notes of some kind of amorous despair from the hollow of his melodious calabash. The examinador and Colonel Perez lulled themselves to sleep with a conversation about the beauties and beatitudes of their wives, now playing the part of Penelopes in their absence. To hear the eulogies of the examinador, an angel fallen perpendicularly from heaven could hardly have realized the physical and moral qualities of the spouse he had left in Sorata. The Castilian tongue lent wonderful pomp and magnificence to this portrait, and as the metaphors thickened and the superb phrases lost themselves in hyperbole, one would have thought the lady in question was about to fly back to her native stars on a pair of resplendent wings. Colonel Perez furnished an equally elaborate delineation of his own fair helpmate. As for the wife of Lorenzo, nobody knew what she was like, and the panegyric from the lips of her faithful lord rolled on in safety and success. But the personage called by Perez "his Theresa" was a female whom anybody who had passed through the small shopkeeping quarters of Cuzco might have seen every day, as well as heard designated by her common nickname (given no one knows why) of Malignant Quinsy; and, arguing in algebraic fashion from the known to the unknown, it was not difficult to be convinced that the poetic flights of the examinador were equally the work of fond flattery. Surprised by a midnight storm, the camp was broken up before the early daylight, and our explorers' caravan moved on without breakfast. This necessary stop-gap was arranged for at the first pleasant spot on the route. An old clearing soon appeared, provided with the welcome accommodation of an _ajoupa_, or shed built upon four posts. At the command of _Alto alli!_--"Halt there!"--uttered by Perez in the tone he had formerly used in governing his troops, the whole band stopped as one person; the porters dumped their bales with a significant _ugh!_ the Bolivian bark-hunters laid down their axes; and the gentlemen arranged themselves around the parallelogram of the hut, attending the commissariat developments of Colonel Perez. The site which hazard had so conveniently offered was named Chaupichaca. It was the scene of an ancient wood-cutting, around which the trunks of the antique forests showed themselves in a warm soft light, like the columns of a temple or the shafts of a mosque.