All the lakes have their secrets. The little lake of Orcos still holds the golden chain with links wrist-thick made by Huayna Ccapac at the birth of his eldest son. It encompassed the market-place of Cuzco. It was so weighty that “two hundred Indians having seized the links of it to the rings in their ears were scarce able to raise it from the ground.” After the coming of the Spaniards, it was thrown for safe-keeping into this round, deep pool filled by unknown springs. Safe indeed it is. Orcos has not given up its charge, though repeated attempts have been made to reach the bottom. Trying to drain it by a sluice and trench, the Spaniards “unhappily crossed upon a vein of hard rock, at which, pecking a long time, they found that they struck more fire out of it than they drew water"--the opposite element from the one they expected. Up against the sky lies a sea where men sail in boats of grass--Lake Titicaca, where ships are silently struck by lightning without crash of thunder. On these high seas the navigator has to go by instinct, because of the loadstone round about--magnetic iron, it is now less picturesquely called. Saint Elmo’s fire blazes from ships’ masts on stormy nights. Sometimes a pointed tongue of black clouds swings from above, “like the trunk of some gigantic elephant searching the ground.” A similar one raises itself from the surface of the water, slapping back and forth, seeking the point of the tongue above, and when they have found each other, they join in a mighty, black column, out of which burst thunder and lightning. It whirls off everything within reach and sucks down a passing _balsa_ (boat of reeds) into a depth never sounded. The water of Lake Titicaca is ice-cold and brackish. Its strangely fashioned fishes never come to the surface. It is inhabited by great animals like sea-cows, occasionally seen resting on a beach of some remote inlet. The grottoes along the shore are guarded by gray and black night herons and inhabited by the sea-cow or other monsters! Queer birds haunt the wide stretches of _totora_ growing along the shore, reeds whose stems are used for making boats, and whose tips are used as salad. Here live the stately _puna_ geese, dazzling white, with green wings shading into violet; black water-hens, white _quinlla_, dark green _yanahuico_ with long, thin, bent bills, finely etched ducks, ibises, _licli_, metallically bright, and sea-gulls from the Atlantic. Coal is found on the shores of Titicaca, which suggests a mystery. At what elevation could tropical coal plants grow? The bones of mastodons are also here. But rocks even higher up are smoothed as if by waves, and beaches are found like those of the actual sea. Both Humboldt and Darwin found shells, once crawling on the bottom of the sea, now embedded fourteen thousand feet above its level.