Could the beauties of Nature have taken the place of human interests, Fray Fernando need not have felt forlorn, even on the summit of Cerro Blanco. He had but to ascend the height where the miners’ shaft had been sunk, to command a view sublime and glorious as the imagination could conceive. Far above, the magnificent snow-clad peaks of the Andes pierced the cloudless sky; while as far beneath, the rich and cultivated vale of Nasca wound like a variegated thread from the mountain’s base through the sandy desert to the distant ocean. It is true that often, while the mountain-peaks glistened in sunshine, a thick veil of mist obscured all that lay beneath; yet even then the scene had a wild, weird grandeur of its own. Will it be believed that Fray Fernando’s steps but seldom led him to the spot that commanded such a prospect? Not that he was unimpressed by its sublimity; rather otherwise,—he felt it too keenly. The everlasting hills shadowed and oppressed his spirit with the sense of a Power and Presence too awful and too near for his peace. “Surely God is in this place!” was the language of his heart; and, unhappily, God was a terror to him. He desired nothing so much as to forget Him; or, if that had been possible, to hide himself in secret places where He could not see him. From part of the pathway between the mine and the galpon, or square—as the miners’ village was called—might be seen the mountain-pass by which travellers sometimes made their way from the valleys of the coast into the interior of the country. Such travellers, if Spaniards, were usually glad to accept shelter and hospitality from the little mining colony; and it need not be said that the intelligence they brought with them from the civilized world was considered ample payment by the exiles. But if the wayfarers were of Indian race, their fleet footsteps only grew all the fleeter until the lair of the hated and dreaded Spaniards was well out of sight. It became a habit with Fray Fernando to walk to the spot whence the pass could be seen. Why he did this it is not easy to say. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he clung to the shadow of the social life now shut out from him; or perhaps he dreaded visitors rather than hoped for them. However this may have been, a restless impulse seemed to drive him thither two or three times in the day, and sometimes even late at night. But this might have been because he slept little.