In this region the table-land is of vast expanse, and in many respects the panorama is more impressive even than that in the vicinity of Aconcagua. In the center is the enormous sheet of water, turquoise blue in the sunlight, stretching for a hundred and ten miles off to the south, with an average width of thirty miles and an average depth of a hundred fathoms, and, 12,500 feet high as it is, bordered on either side by superb ranges towering many thousands of feet higher, their clean-cut peaks glittering with mantles of snow and ice. Around the shore and on the islands of Titicaca and Koati are picturesque towns and small clusters of adobe houses surrounded by hills, their sides terraced and covered with farms, the water fringed with fields of reeds, and feeding in them countless birds and herds of cattle. It is no wonder that these “Children of the Sun” should have worshiped as their God and Goddess the great luminous orbs in a region where, thanks to the unwonted splendor of the moon and stars, which enable one to distinguish all the salient features of lake and Cordillera with the greatest ease, the nights, as Mozans says, are glorious beyond words; but where, “however fair the views presented to the enraptured gaze in the subdued light of the moon and her attendant handmaidens, no one can be insensible to the gorgeous vistas that burst upon the vision during the daytime.” It is then, he continues— “Especially at the hours of dawn and twilight that the snow-crested range of the lofty Cordillera Real is visible in all its transcendent beauty and majesty. For then, as if by magic, various colored fires seem to blaze from the immense glaciers and snow fields and to convert the sparkling expanse into glowing rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, while the lofty peaks of the Sorata range are transformed into gleaming pinnacles of burnished gold. Then in fullest perfection and palpable form is realized that vision of mountain loveliness, that crowning splendor of earth and sky, set forth in Ruskin’s noble lines: ‘Wait yet for one hour, until the east again becomes purple and the heaving mountains, rolling against it in the darkness like waves of a wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of its burning. Watch the white glaciers blaze in their winding paths about the mountains, like mighty serpents with scales of fire; watch the columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling downwards, chasm by chasm, each in itself a new morning—their long avalanches cast down in keen streams brighter than the lightning, sending each its tribute of driven snow, like altar-smoke, up to the heaven, the rose-light of their silent domes flushing that heaven about them and above them, piercing with purer light through its purple lines of lifted cloud, casting a new glory on every wreath as it passes by, until the whole heaven, one scarlet canopy, is interwoven with a