The large dark cave was gently steaming. The water filling it gurgled out from sunless twilight, hot from the hold of the earth, cool as it spread over the desert valley from the mouth of the cave. A brown man and his little daughter, lying in it, were being waved to and fro by the water as it issued, just their heads visible. Saturating the bamboo tangle, it left a wake of gardens, orange and guava trees, citrons, figs, and slender _paltas_, tall _chirimoyas_ and _pacays_, grown to fruit-bearing size in six months. Trees of the jungle bathing in incandescent desert light! There were thick mimosas, geranium trees, and darts of poinsettia, grape-vines a foot across at the root, and spikes of heavy-smelling tuberoses. Jasmine trailed on the trellis above my head, and bougainvillea made a roof of purple flowers. The slope of the sand-hills was crossed in the foreground by shadows of orange groves, “indefinitely elongated.” Domestic constellations glowed in their black foliage. Men in _ponchos_ whirled up on mule-back, unbuckled their three-inch spurs, and flapped their saddles down. This time the mirage was real. Old Dorothea came down from her bright green veranda, where the sunshine glistened from a humming-bird’s wings as it hovered above a passion flower, a whirl of black fringe with yellow deeps, the favored blossom which the Incas carried in their hands as a sign of greatness. She held a dove in the crotch of her arm and offered me a bunch of narcissus and white fleurs-de-lis, unthinkably sweet. She was dressed in yellow ocher and an old straw hat which she removed on being introduced to ladies. Her little earless dancing dog did a _cueca_ (native dance) for us, while she clapped queer aboriginal time, and the gold hands danced in her ears. Birds sang in the thorn hedgerows, and frogs croaked in the warm pool, frogs which die in cold water. Dorothea said that some day the desert will again be covered with forests and gardens, as it was before it became a desert. In a cloud of dust made luminous by the sun, a drove of llamas galloped down over the desert hillside to drink, soft eyes wonderingly looking out from tall fuzzy heads, legs bungling with heavy wool. An old Indian woman in Panama hat and brilliant blankets followed slowly, puffing at a pipe. [Illustration: A CHARACTERISTIC PERUVIAN CHURCH] This pool in a shadowed vale of the western Andes, a shady, sweet-smelling spot, lost in an immensity of desert, is a little solitude in the midst of a great solitude, hospitable by sweet contrast. It takes very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny fish, where it will find its world and paradise all in one, with never an intimation of the dry bank.