The wind, seeming to tear up the ground and pulverize the summits, is unable to dissipate a mist which magnifies the rocks and presents the traveler’s giant shadow with a whole system of concentric rainbow halos--his apotheosis in the clouds. The wind brings with it cold clouds of dust laid only by a fresh fall of snow. It mummifies the beasts of burden which fall by the way. Mirages, too, the escort of tropical heat, shimmer upon these arctic plains. With all the paraphernalia of the torrid zone, limitless vagaries of torrid force which knows no law of custom, the _puna_ has no enjoyment of it. For the cold seems also to have taken on the exuberance of tropical nature. * * * * * You may lose your way in a snow-storm; or in the hot and stifling valleys, where the tropical sun can concentrate, you may die of the bite of a venomous serpent. Parched by fever-thirst, you may not drink the water, for it brings varieties of diseases, bounded by their valleys’ walls. Your mule may sink into a morass or break his leg in a _viscacha_ burrow. He may eat a poisonous _mala yerba_ or _garbanzillos_. Broadly laden, he may be scraped off a bridle-path clinging to the sheer precipice. He may be carried away by the swift current of a glacier stream in attempting to ford it. He may collapse from lack of air and leave you stranded in a lifeless desert. _Soroche_-sick and burned to a crisp by the relentless cold, you urge on the staggering mule as he stops constantly to gulp the thin air. He cannot be satisfied, although he has a second set of nostrils cut through to ease his breathing and avert _soroche_. Still the glaciers crawl down from brooding peaks above. The sun, magician of the bleak mountain regions, comes out and glints green on broken strata of the red mountains. It discovers all the bright colors in the hills of porphyry and clothes them with fresh shadows. It runs along a vein of shining mica to accuse it. It plunges into the middle of a lake of polished jet settled in the snow, “making a great, golden hole.” A single hill in sunlight glows with streaks of iris-color, matching the rainbow forms as they appear above and fade again. Little cloud islets surround far-off peaks, sunk beneath the horizon. Pyramids of ice twinkle, and fantastic stone needles stand in rows too precipitous for snow to cling to their bare sides. They are called early inhabitants, which Pachacamac in his anger turned to stone. The air, though thin almost to disappearance, cuts like a razor-edge. With eyelashes frozen together, you can yet be sunstruck. Teeth to teeth, cold and heat meet upon “the waste, chaotic battlefield of Frost and Fire.” Cold is besieged in vain by the sun at its hottest. This land of silent chaos takes on the cold of outer space so near by, which, shot through by the fierce heat of the sun, is incapable of absorbing any warmth.