A Boy of the Andes.
A Boy of the Andes.
Probably they would not have seen Ramon Ynga at all, but for the llamas. There was enough else to look at. The overpowering walls of the mountains on both sides seemed to turn the eyes, even as they turned the foaming Rimac, into a channel from which there was no escape. Up at the end of the cleft was such a sight as no man can long hold his eyes from—the black peak of Chin-chán, bent down with its load of eternal winter. There is something awful about the snow that never melts—the great blank fields, the wrinkled glaciers, the savage ice cornices, the black rocks that peer out hopelessly here and there. It is so different from the friendly white we know and welcome for its sleigh rides and coastings, its snow men and snow-ballings.
It was far up the summit of the Peruvian cordillera, at the very foot of the last wild peaks that stand 18,000 feet in the sky. Where the panting mules trudged, 3,000 feet below the peaks, was low, green herbage; and 500 feet lower yet the little torrent, white as its mother snows, roared and chuckled alternately to the uneven wind. But up yonder all was so white and still; their eyes kept lifting up to it, forgetful of the dangerous trail—the mules could take care of that. They, poor brutes, seemed ill at ease. They breathed in short, loud gasps; and every forty feet or so they stopped and rested for a few moments, unmindful of the spur. Then, when they were ready, they started up again of their own accord, sighing heavily. They would not last much longer, at this rate.
“I think I’ll get off and walk awhile,” said the younger of the two, a bronzed, sinewy man of twenty-five. “It spoils even this scenery for me, to see the suffering of the mules. One wouldn’t think they’d play out so, on such a good trail.”