There indeed they thought themselves wanderers beyond the limits that God had set to human life. Before and behind and around them towered the vast white shapes that seemed like the guardians of the portals of some other world into which no human foot had ever ventured. The icy blasts smote them with the keenness of sword-edges, and they and their labouring, shivering beasts gasped agonisingly for breath in the thin, frozen air. At night cavalier and charger, man and brute, huddled together for warmth, for those awful wastes held neither tree nor shrub to furnish fuel for a fire. Their commonest duties seemed to them like the labour of slaves, and once a man-at-arms who sought to warm himself by running down a hill-slope fell prone ere he had gone fifty paces, with the blood gushing from his nose and mouth and ears, and his eyes starting out of his head. When they went to take him up he was already dead and the blood that had come from him frozen hard. Still through all they pressed on, for their Captain, ever the last to rest and the first to move, had but one word on his lips, and that was “onward,” and there was not a man among them who would have dared the shame of retreat or the bitterness of the reproach with which Pizarro would have bade him go back. And so, as old Carvahal and the great Pedro de Candia had often used the little breath they had to spare in saying, since there is no staircase, however high, but must have a top step, they came at length to a curved ridge of grey-brown grass that sloped between two ice-crowned pinnacles of rock, and here, standing, as it seemed, upon the very roof-tree of the world, they saw before and behind them only downward slopes. Here Pizarro called a halt that was right welcome to every man and beast in the troop, and, calling Filipillo and the guides to him, he held a short conference with them. And when this was over he faced his pinched and starving, shivering followers, who had gathered in little huddled groups about him, and said in a voice that sounded strangely unlike his own in the thin, dry, cold air-- “Comrades, by the grace of God and with the help of His Holy Mother and the blessed Saints, we have won our way through the terrors of this wilderness to the threshold of the new land which shall be ours. The labours of the upward way are over. Henceforth our steps trend downwards from these fearsome solitudes, forsaken of man, if not of God since His arm has protected us even here, once more into the haunts of men and the home of warmth and sunshine. Did yonder snow-cloud break ye would see through it your first glimpse of the Land of Promise!”