From Callao to Valparaiso the coast is a panorama of desolation--a constant succession of bleak and barren cliffs, with not a green or lovely thing for fifteen hundred miles. On one side is the Pacific Ocean, with its great swells sweeping almost around the globe, as regular and constant as the throbbings of the human pulse. On the other side rise the impenetrable Andes in a range whose altitude averages fifteen thousand feet, and whose peaks tower twenty and twenty-two thousand feet above the sea. Between the ocean and the mountains for a thousand miles, with a varying width from twenty to fifty miles, lies a strip of drifting sand, which no rivers water, and where rain never falls. All the water used by the inhabitants is taken from the ocean, that for mechanical purposes being used in its natural condition, and that for food being condensed into steam, and purged of its salt by machinery. There is not a well or a spring along the coast, and drinking-water is an article of merchandise, like ice or flour, costing about seven cents a gallon to the consumers. Some distance below Callao, upon a great rock which rises from the sea, and shows an unbroken surface to the western sun, is carved the image of a candelabra--an eight-horned candlestick--about one hundred feet long and fifty feet across from end to end of the lower arms. The execution is perfect, and it is said to be carved in lines about a foot deep and a yard wide. When and how the picture came there no one can tell. The oldest sailor on the coast says that the oldest man he knew when a boy could tell nothing of its origin. They call it “The Miraculous Candlestick,” and pious Catholics say that St. James dropped it when he came to Peru and placed himself at the head of the Spaniards, at the time they were driving the Incas out of their ancient homes. In the interior of Peru, upon a similar rock, is the imprint of a human foot as long as a pikestaff, which is supposed to mark where the Apostle alighted when he dropped down from heaven to aid in the subjugation of the heathen and the triumph of the Cross. At any rate, like the foot of St. James, this image of the Holy Candlestick, if made by human labor, must have cost months and months of toil at a time when such things were needed to impress the Indians with a reverence for the Church of Rome and the doctrines it taught. Sometimes, if the wind blows seaward, the carving is covered by the drifting sand, when the padre of the nearest village goes down with a lot of Indians to dig it out. [Illustration: A PERUVIAN PORT.]