Early next morning we started on an excursion to the valley lake, each of us mounted on a fine mule from the abbé's stables, and attended by an _arriero_. North as well as south of San Cristobal (as the village was generally called) the country had the same garden-like aspect. There was none of the tangled vegetation which in tropical forests impedes the traveller's progress; except where they had been planted by the roadside for protection from the sun, or bent over the water-courses, the trees grew wide apart like trees in a park. Men and women were busy in the fields and plantations, for the abbé had done even a more wonderful thing than restoring the great _azequia_--converted a tribe of indolent aborigines into an industrious community of husbandmen and craftsmen; among them were carpenters, smiths, masons, weavers, dyers, and cunning workers in silver and gold. The secret of his power was the personal ascendancy of a strong man, the naturally docile character of his converts, the inflexible justice which characterized all his dealings with them, and the belief assiduously cultivated, that as he had been their benefactor in this world he could control their destinies in the next. Though he never punished he was always obeyed, and there was probably not a man or woman under his sway who would have hesitated to obey him, even to death. The lake was small yet picturesque, its verdant banks deepening by contrast the dark desolation of the arid mountains in which it was embosomed. Some three thousand feet above it rose the extinct volcano, the slopes of which in the days of the Incas were terraced and cultivated. Angela and I half rode, half walked to the top; but the abbé, on the plea that he had some business to look after, stayed at the bottom. The crater was about eight hundred yards in diameter and filled nearly to the brim with crystal water, which outflowed by a wide and well made channel into the lake, the supply being kept up by the in-flow from the _azequia_, whose course we could trace far into the mountains. The view from our coigne of vantage was unspeakably grand. Behind us rose the stupendous range of the Andes, with its snow-white peaks and smoking volcanoes; before us the oasis of Quipai rolled like a river of living green to the shores of the measureless ocean, whose shining waters in that clear air and under that azure sky seemed only a few miles away, while, as far as the eye could reach, the coast-line was fringed with the dreary waste where I had so nearly perished. The oasis, as I now for the first time discovered, was a valley, a broad shallow depression in the desert falling in a gentle slope from the foot of the Cordillera to the sea, whereby its irrigation was greatly facilitated. "How beautiful Quipai looks, and how like a river!" said Angela. "That is what I always think when I come here--how like a river!" "Who knows that long ago the valley was not the bed of a river!"