For some time we sat in silence, each busy with his own thoughts, all of us glad of the day’s relaxation from our work. Presently the silence was broken by this one and that one, each remark shewing where their thoughts lay. The youngest of the group, and the latest addition to our number, with more of the artistic temperament in him than his older companions, drew a breath of absolute pleasure, and whispered almost to himself, as he gazed on the magnificent grandeur of the scene before him, “Could anything on earth be more beautiful?”
Old Jock McKenzie, chuckled to himself and exclaimed:
“Beauty be blowed! I see no beauty in them mountains with the snaw alus on their heids; beauty is aye in tha een that sees it. I ken an auld cottage and a wee bit kirk in Fifeshire that has more beauty to me een than awe the mountain peaks in Peru.”
“How long is it since you left home, Jock?” I asked.
“Thirty long years, lad,” he answered, “and every year since then I have made up my mind to go back to the hameland and here I am yet. But I’ll see the dear auld place again before another year is out, I’ll warrant yu.”
For a few minutes there was silence, as each man puffed away at his pipe, when suddenly it was broken by old Jack Scrobbie, a rough specimen of humanity, who remarked:
“It’s all very well for some of you youngsters talking about beauty and scenery and such like, but a fellow can’t drink scenery and mountain peaks, and it’s damned dry work sitting here and smoking like a petrified smoke stack. I must have drink, if I go to the divel for it. Who’s for Chicha?”
Old Jock McKenzie, and two others joined him, and going over the gulley to the tool shed, got one of the light hand trolleys out and put it on the rails. Chicha camp and station was about three and a half miles below where we were stationed, and was at that time the highest point to which the engine was able to go. Here there were a number of drinking shanties, with all their attendant evils, and the whole place had a bad character.
Now to reach this place the trolley had to go round a very sharp and dangerous curve. The cutting itself was only about sixteen feet into the face of the mountain, and the outer rail was laid within four feet of the edge of a sheer precipice of two thousand feet. The trolley used was the common four-wheeled flat trolley, without sides, having four holes in the body, one in front of each wheel. Through these holes were put wood handspikes, which were pressed against the wheels to act as brakes when going downhill.
Just as they were about to start, one of the men sitting near me called out: