Peru’s railroads cover but fifteen hundred miles, but they are pushing forward rapidly to fill in its section of the long-promised Pan-American railway from Panamá to Patagonia. One of these, the Oroya road, which ascends from Lima up into the plateau country, is altogether the most impressive piece of railroad engineering in the world; it is not only the highest, but there is no other that lifts its wondering passengers to any such altitude in such an appallingly short space of time. For an hour or more the train winds through a wide, irrigated valley, green and prosperous-looking with plantations of sugar cane. Farther up, the valley narrows and is closed in by naked rocks. Twenty-five miles from Lima a station is reached twenty-eight hundred feet above the sea; twelve miles farther the altitude is five thousand feet. At Casapalca, the town of smelters, thirteen thousand six hundred feet is achieved by the puffing, vibrating engine; at fourteen thousand feet the chimneys of Casapalca’s smelters look like pins stuck in the green carpet below, and finally, the passenger descends from the train, very uncertain on his feet, at the unprecedented height of 15,665 feet, and stands on the cold, wind-swept Andean roof. On every hand are peaks and hoods of snow. Beyond the station the rechristened Mount Meiggs rises another two thousand feet, as a monument to the indefatigable Yankee promoter and soldier of fortune who conceived and built the road—Henry Meiggs. Turning to the west, one looks back over the long, infinitely varied descent; to the east lie the plateaus and the Andean treasure land. The northern branch of the road continues along almost equally high levels, past the historic plains of Junín on which Bolívar dealt his crushing blow to the viceroy’s army in 1824, to Cerro de Pasco, where the American mining syndicate is preparing to get rich. II A still more extensive railroad and one which gives the traveler a more varied view of the Andes, is that ascending from the port city of Mollendo, near the Chilean frontier. This line is the outlet for much of the commerce of Bolivia, and was built by the same gifted Yankee who fathered the Oroya road. Leaving Mollendo, the train speeds over the desert for a few miles and then begins its steady climb upward. All day it labors along the tortuous ascent through echoing walls of rock, bare, repellent, and awe-inspiring in their cold majesty. Suddenly, around a jagged precipice, the passengers look down upon a lovely valley—an oasis of green. In its midst lies the quaint, picturesque old city of Arequipa, which Pizarro, who founded it, was wont to call _la villa hermosa_—the city beautiful. Seen from the heights, it somewhat resembles La Paz, a group of low, white and blue walled, red roofed buildings, arranged in squares, with a large plaza in the center, the general flatness relieved by many church spires, and its spacious patios a mass of foliage and trees.