On the following morning, however, the imposing caravan started, with the first light of day, upon its journey toward the coast, winding its way along the eastern margin of the Sacred Lake until it reached its southern extremity, when it swerved away to the south-westward across the valley in which the lake lay embosomed, toward the towering snow-peaks of the western cordillera of the Andes. The first three days of the journey were quite pleasant and uneventful, for during that time the caravan was winding its slow way across the mountain valley; but on the fourth day the train entered a mountain pass which the Peruvians asserted was known only to themselves--and which they had chosen in order to avoid the possibility of collision with the armed forces of the Spaniards; and thenceforward, for four full days, the train wound its perilous way along narrow pathways bounded on the one hand by towering, inaccessible, rocky cliffs, and on the other by ghastly precipices, of such awful depth that their bases were frequently hidden by the wreaths of mountain mist floating far below; across frail swing bridges stretched from side to side of those awful, fathomless rifts called _barrancas_ which seem to be peculiar to the Andes; or up and down steep, rugged, almost precipitous slopes where a single false step or a loose stone would send man or beast whirling away down to death a thousand feet below. But the llamas seemed to be more sure-footed than mountain goats, and despite their loads they scrambled up and down apparently inaccessible places, or plodded sedately along the narrowest and most dizzy ledges without accident, while the Peruvians seemed to be absolutely at home among the peaks and precipices. But at length, after four full days of incessant peril, the train emerged from the last mountain pass and found itself upon a sloping, grassy plateau on the western slope of the Andes, with the limitless Pacific stretching away into the infinite distance, and the perils and hardships of the journey were at an end; for thenceforward the road wound its serpentine way downward through a series of ravines that, wild and savage enough at first, gradually widened out into gentle, grassy, tree-clad slopes that led down to the sandy plains which lie between the lower spurs of the Andes and the ocean. It took the train two days to cross these plains, which, under the neglect of the Spaniards, were fast returning to the desert state from which, under the wise rule of the Incas, they had been reclaimed; and finally, on the seventeenth day of the journey the entire train arrived safely at the little Peruvian village on the site of which the important port of Arica now stands. And thanks to the precautions adopted by the guide of the party, not a Spaniard had been encountered on any part of the journey.