Then they passed silently through the sleeping galpon; and, before the morning dawned, were far beyond the reach of the astonished Diego. IX. The Journey. “The high Peruvian solitudes among.” HEMANS. Now did Fray Fernando and his young companion behold in all their glory “the works of the Lord, and the wonders of His hand.” For their way to Cuzco led them across the mighty Andes. Of these Cerro Blanco, though in any other land it would have taken rank as a monarch mountain, was only a kind of sentinel, or advanced guard. It looked down protectingly on the valleys beneath, but it looked up reverently to the white and shadowy peaks of snow which rose, one above the other, far as the eye could reach. Fray Fernando had been wont to think of the Andes as a “corderilla,” or chain; now he knew them as a vast gigantic army—God’s great army—at His creative word arising from the earth, and ranging themselves in what to the eye of man seemed magnificent confusion, but was majestic order in His sight, who saw the whole. “In His hand,” said Fray Fernando, “are the high places of the earth, and the strength of the hills is His also. He, and He alone, telleth their number, and calleth them all by name; even as He doth the stars, which their ice-crowned pinnacles almost seem to touch.” As, in compliance with the advice of José, the travellers began their journey by descending to the vale of Nasca, in order to avail themselves of an Inca road from thence to Cuzco, they had occasion to traverse, and that more than once, each of the zones into which different gradations of altitude divide that wonderful region. They passed through valleys where tropical vegetation displayed all its gorgeous magnificence. There rose the giant palms, slender, tall, and graceful; there flourished many a wondrous flowering tree; there bloomed the magnolia, the cactus, the balsam, spreading out purple, white, or scarlet petals to the hot, heavily perfumed air; while “strange bright birds, on their starry wings,” glittering with clear hard metallic lustre, flitted from bough to bough, from blossom to blossom. José, who took upon himself almost entirely the direction of the journey, gathered for his patron sweet dates, or luscious chirimoyas, looking like large green oranges. But he warned him that they must not linger in these valleys. “They are the abodes of fever,” he said. And indeed Fray Fernando himself was willing enough to pass on to a purer and cooler atmosphere.