My gloomy forebodings were only too fully realized. Never was a more miserably monotonous journey. After riding for weeks, through sodden, sunless forests and trackless wastes we had to abandon our mules and take to our feet, spend weeks on nameless rivers, poling and paddling our canoe in the terrible heat, and tormented almost to madness by countless insects. Then the rains came on, and we were weather-stayed for months in a wretched Indian village. But for the help of friendly aborigines--and fortunately the few we met, being spoken fair showed themselves friendly--we must all have perished. They gave us food, lent us canoes, served us as pilots and guides, and thought themselves well paid with a piece of scarlet cloth or a handful of glass beads. My men turned out quite as ill as I had been led to expect. Several deserted at the outset, two or three died of fever, two were eaten by alligators, and when we first caught sight of the Andes, Gahra was my sole companion. We were in a pitiful plight. I was weak from the effects of a fever, Gahra lame from the effects of an accident. My money was nearly all gone, my baggage had been lost by the upsetting of a canoe, and our worldly goods consisted of two sorry mules, our arms, the ragged clothes on our backs, and a few pieces of silver. How we were to cross the Andes, and what we should do when we reached Peru was by no means clear. As yet, the fortune which I had set out to seek seemed further off than ever. We had found neither gold nor silver nor precious stones, and all the coin I had in my waist-belt would not cover the cost of a three days' sojourn at the most modest of _posaderos_. But we have left behind us the sombre and rain-saturated forests of the Amazon and the Orinoco, and the fine country around us and the magnificent prospect before us made me, at least, forget for the moment both our past privations and our present anxieties. We are on the _montaña_ of the eastern Cordillera, a mountain land of amazing fertility, well wooded, yet not so thickly as to render progress difficult; the wayside is bordered with brilliant flowers, cascades tumble from rocky heights, and far away to the west rise in the clear air the glorious Andes, alps on alps, a vast range of stately snow-crowned peaks, endless and solemn, veiled yet not hidden by fleecy clouds, and as cold and mysterious as winter stars looking down on a sleeping world. For a long time I gaze entranced at the wondrous scene, and should probably have gone on gazing had not Gahra reminded me that the day was well-nigh spent and that we were still, according to the last information received, some distance from the mission of San Andrea de Huanaco, otherwise Valle Hermoso, or Happy Valley.