The Galera tunnel is the crowning point of a magnificent achievement. In the centre you stand on the Great Divide of the South Americas, nearly 16,000 feet above the ocean. When a bucket of water is upset, one half of the liquid runs eastward towards the Atlantic, while the other flows westward to the Pacific. Oroya is 31½ miles distant from the eastern portal of the tunnel on the great inland plateau of the continent, and only a little less than 3,500 feet below it. On this section construction was very rapid, as there were no untoward difficulties to be overcome. [Illustration: A BRITISH LOCOMOTIVE IN THE REALM OF PERPETUAL ANDEAN SNOW, 15,865 FEET ABOVE SEA-LEVEL, ON THE OROYA RAILWAY] About the same time as the Oroya railway was commenced another great line was undertaken some miles to the south. In this instance the port of Mollendo was the Pacific terminus, the inland objective being Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, that remarkable inland sea nestling among the crests of the Alps some 14,660 feet above the Pacific. The total length of this line is 332 miles, and it divides with the Antofagasta railway to the south the traffic between La Paz and the seaboard. Though it does not compare with the Oroya or Central railway of Peru as an engineering achievement, yet it possesses certain individual characteristics, the tumbled mountain country experienced farther north giving way to open expanses of bleak, dismal desert. [Illustration: LOOKING THROUGH THE TUNNELS ON THE OROYA RAILWAY An exhilarating coast at 45 miles an hour for 107 miles can be made from Galera tunnel to Callao upon the small hand-car shown in the photograph.] This line in its ascent of the Andes skirts the base of that most majestic of mountains, the smoking El Misti, whose snow-topped crater rises like a grim sentinel far above the other visible points of the mountain chain. Here the mountains are nobler and wider apart, so that one can grasp better their magnificent proportions, while their flanks are not so scarred, and there is an absence of those fearsome, yawning ravines. In making the ascent the line describes broad sweeping curves to avoid projecting peaks, and throughout the whole distance there is a notable relief from the zigzags and switches so frequent on the sister line.