From a tree about fifteen feet high Angela plucked a round green fruit, not unlike an apple, but covered with small knobs and scales. Then she showed me how to remove the skin, which covered a snow-white juicy pulp of exquisite fragrance and a flavor that I hardly exaggerated in calling divine. It was a fruit fit for the gods, and so I said. "We owe it all to the great _azequia_," observed the abbé. "See, it feeds these rills and fills those fountains, waters our fields, and makes the desert bloom like the rose and the dry places rejoice. And we have not only fruit and flowers, but corn, coffee, cocoa, yuccas, potatoes, and almost every sort of vegetable." "Quipai is a land of plenty and a garden of delight." "A most apt description, and so long as the great _azequia_ is kept in repair and the system of irrigation which I have established is maintained it will remain a land of plenty and a garden of delight." "And if any harm should befall the _azequia_?" "In that case, and if our water-supply were to fail, Quipai, as you see it now, would cease to exist. The desert, which we are always fighting and have so far conquered, would regain the mastery, and the mission become what I found it, a little oasis at the foot of the Cordillera, supporting with difficulty a few score families of naked Indians. One of these days, if you are so disposed, you shall follow the course of the _azequia_ and see for yourself with what a marvellous reservoir, fed by Andean snows, Nature has provided us. But more of this another time. Look! Yonder is San Cristobal, our capital as I sometimes call it, though little more than a village." The abbé said truly. It was little more than a village; but as gay, as picturesque, and as bright as a scene in an opera--two double rows of painted houses forming a large oval, the space between them laid out as a garden with straight walks and fountains and clipped shrubs, after the fashion of Versailles; in the centre a church and two other buildings, one of which, as the abbé told me, was a school, the other his own dwelling. The people we met saluted him with great humility, and he returned their salutations quite _en grand seigneur_, even, as I thought, somewhat haughtily. One woman knelt in the road, kissed his hand, and asked for his blessing, which he gave like the superior being she obviously considered him. It was the same in the village. Everybody whom we met or passed stood still and uncovered. There could be no question who was master in San Cristobal. Abbé Balthazar was both priest and king, and, as I afterward came to know, there was every reason why he should be.