Power looked out over the appalling vista of barren hills and tree-choked ravines which lay in front. In the direction shown by the Indian he saw a slight depression in an otherwise unbroken ring of unscalable mountains, and it was reasonable to assume that the milk-white glacier stream flowing through a canyon a thousand feet beneath must find its way to the sea through that gap. It was so long since he had glanced at a map of South America that he had only the vaguest notion of his whereabouts. As a rough guess, beyond those tremendous highlands lay the plains of Lower Argentina--the black, wind-swept, semidesert pampas. At the lowest calculation, he was three hundred and fifty miles from the Atlantic, and fifty of those miles offered such difficulties to man's endeavor that well-equipped expeditions had turned back time and again from attempts to find new passes through the Andes in that region. To try and reach the eastern coast meant almost certain death; but the scowling faces of the Indians showed that the effort must be made, unless he was prepared to fall under their weapons then and there. The uncouth tongue he had acquired on the Trans-Andean slope was not of much avail with his present custodians; but, when he asked the leader of the party for a spear, he was understood. By nothing less, in Power's view, than the direct intervention of Providence, the man was minded to treat the matter as a joke, and handed over his own spear, a nine-foot shaft of tough and limber hickory, tipped with a flat blade of iron about eight inches in length and two in width at its widest part. A stout shank was gripped by the split wood, and strongly bound in its socket with a thong of hide. Singularly enough, these savages had never searched their prisoner's pockets. Probably, they were afraid to touch him, lest he laid some evil spell on them; so he was able now to produce a silver dollar, which he gave with a smile, indicating, at the same time, his willingness to purchase a couple of strips of the dried meat carried by some members of the escort. This request was refused peremptorily, and a distinctly threatening gesture warned Power that the parley was at an end. He turned resolutely toward the rising sun, and began his lonely and affrighting Odyssey. He admitted afterward that he knew what fear meant during the first few strides across the broken ground, because he was suspicious lest the Indians might have planned to spear him from behind. Indeed, some such barbaric pleasantry may have occurred to them. A fierce clamor of talk broke out suddenly; but a swirl of snow swept down from a neighboring glacier, and even these hardy savages had no desire to be caught on that dangerous scree in a snowstorm. So the hubbub died away as quickly as it had arisen.