"You're an excitable party," Ned laughed. "You want your own way! I've been wondering, while I've been giving you first aid to the indignant, what your name really is, and where you live."
"You'd better be trying to ascertain where we are," declared
Collins, "and what chance we have of getting out alive."
"I think I can tell you about where we are," Ned replied. "We were in the air not far from five hours. The Vixen will run about sixty miles an hour, therefore we are not fax from three hundred miles from Lima, in a southeast direction. Do you know if we are near any town?"
Collins sulked a short time and then nodded toward a great peak which rose above all the others in the distance.
"That may be Vilcanota," he said.
"Old Vilcanota seems to be a whale," Ned observed, looking up at the snow cap.
"Over 17,000 feet high," was the sullen rejoinder.
"Well," the boy went on, "if that really is Vilcanota, we are still in the land of the living. In fact, we can't be more than twenty-five miles from a town, and there is a railroad—so my maps say—over to the east. It ends at Sicuani, and there the upper branch of the Uacayli river begins. This river empties into the Amazon at the head of steamboat navigation, the maps say."
"You seem to know a lot about this part of South America," gritted
Collins.
"And over to the south," Ned went on, "is Lake Titicaca, and over the mountains from that body of water is Coroico, where the Beni river starts on its long run to the Amazon, by way of the Madeira river."