"All right! we will be careful."
Throwing on their ponchos, they went down to the stream and ran along the bank.
"The water is coming down like a race-horse, Bert, but just ahead it has overflowed its banks. We can have a bath there safely, though it is not deep enough for swimming."
After ten minutes' absence they returned to the camp, completed their dressing, and sat down to breakfast.
"What were all those frightful noises, Dias? Were they pumas or jaguars?"
"They were both, señor. You can easily tell the difference in the sounds they make. The jaguar's is between a roar and a snarl, while the puma's is a sort of a hissing roar."
As soon as breakfast was over, the tents were packed up and the mules and llamas laden. Dias had given them a feed all round an hour before. The course they should take had been already agreed upon; they must descend to the plain, for it would be next to impossible to cross the ravines on the mountain-side.
"Each stream coming down from the hills," Dias said, "must be followed nearly up to its source, but for the next seventy or eighty miles the search need not be so careful as it must be afterwards. The place cannot be far from Tinta, but somewhere this side of it. We need not hurry, for there are two months to spare."
"How do you mean, Dias?"
"On a day that answers to the 21st of March, Coyllur—that is a star—will rise at midnight in a cleft in a peak. It can be seen only in the valley in which the stream that contains the gold runs down. This is what my father taught me; therefore there must be mountains to the south-east, and this can only be where the Cordilleras run east, which is the case at Tinta."