An Inca Grave, Bolivia.
The scenery was magnificent on that railway. Having gone through the Galera tunnel, Mr. Mayer and I got on the small "gravity car," keeping all the time just in front of the train. It was quite an exciting journey, the incline being so great that we soon acquired a vertiginous speed—in fact, too much, because our brakes would not act any more. With the snow and rain the rails had become so slippery that we went sliding down at the most alarming pace. Nor did I feel particularly happy at having the train only a few hundred metres behind us. Whenever we got to a station, we had to get off quickly and get our car off the rails to give room to the incoming train. The cold was intense.
The geological formation of the Andes in that particular region was remarkable, and more remarkable still was the British engineering triumph of constructing a railway from the sea to so high an elevation. In one or two places there were iron bridges of great height and ingenious construction. You felt a curious sensation as you flew over those bridges on the tiny car, and you saw between the rails the chasm underneath you; nor did you feel extraordinarily comfortable when, hundreds of feet down, down below, at the bottom of one chasm, you saw a railway engine which had leapt the rails and lay upside down in the middle of a foaming torrent.
Naturally, in building a mountain railway of that type, a great many curves and zigzags were necessary, many of those curves taking place inside tunnels. Along the railway rivers have been switched off through tunnels within the mountain, and produced picturesque cascades where they came out again.
The geological surprises were continual. Next to mountains with perfectly horizontal strata you saw other mountains with strata in a vertical position, especially in the limestone formation. Farther down immense superposed terraces were to be noticed upon the mountain side, evidently made by the ancient dwellers of that country for the cultivation of their inhospitable land.
This interested me greatly. I had seen among the Igorrotes or head-hunters of the island of Luzon, in the Philippine Archipelago, that same method of irrigation, by collecting the water from a high point on the mountain side in order to irrigate consecutively the series of terraces. Not only was I struck by the fact of finding so unusual a method of cultivation at two points of the globe so far apart, but I was even more impressed by the wonderful resemblance in type between the local natives and the inhabitants of the northern island of the Philippines. Undoubtedly these people came from the same stock.
Where we stopped at the different stations there was always something interesting to observe—now the hundreds of llamas which had conveyed goods to the railway; at one place the numberless sacks of ore waiting to be taken to the coast; at another the tall active chimneys of the smelters, which suggested industry on a large scale. I took a number of photographs under difficulties on that journey down the Andes.