"That is what I ask; that concerns you at least as much as me, I suppose."
"Just so—even more, since it is for my sake that you have agreed to accompany me. Well, what is your advice. I will at once adopt the expedients that your experience may suggest, and accept them without question."
"That is what I call speaking, and your answer is none the worse for making me wait for it. My advice, then would be to stop here, where we can—unless there is a deluge impossible to foresee—place ourselves under shelter from the hurricane, and camp for the night. What do you think of it?"
"I think that you are right, and that it would be folly, under circumstances like those, considering the advanced hour—especially the charming spot where we are—to persist in going further."
"Especially as it would be almost impossible for us to reach as good a refuge as this, before it is quite dark."
"Let us stop, then, without further discussion, and let us hasten to make our encampment."
"Well, dear Señor, as it is to be so, alight and let us unload the mules."
"Very good," said the young man, leaping from his horse—a movement immediately imitated by the Pincheyra.
Don Santiago had spoken truly. The sun was setting, drowned in waves of dull clouds; the evening breeze was rising with some force; the birds wheeled in large circles, uttering discordant cries—everything, in fact, foretold one of those terrible hurricanes called temporales, the violence of which is so great that the country over which they wreak their vengeance is in a few minutes completely changed and thrown into disorder, as if an earthquake had shattered it.
The painter had several times, since his arrival in America, been in a position to witness the terrifying spectacle of these frightful convulsions of nature in labour. Knowing the inconvenience of the danger then, he hastened to prepare everything, so that the tempest might do as little damage as possible. The baggage piled together in the centre of the valley, not far from the stream, formed a solid rampart against the greatest fury of the wind; the horses were left free and abandoned to that infallible instinct with which Providence has endowed them, and which in giving them a foreknowledge of the danger, suggests to them the means of escaping from it. Then, in a hole dug in haste, they lit the fire for cooking the slices of charqui, or wild bull's flesh dried in the sun, destined, with the harina tostada and a little queso of goat's flesh, for the evening meal. The water from the brook served to satisfy the thirst of the travellers, for, except Don Santiago and the painter, who were each provided with a large bota of white brandy, they did not carry with them either wine or liqueurs; but this forgetfulness, if it really was such, was of little importance for men of such great frugality as the Hispano-Americans—people who live, so to speak, on nothing, and whose hunger or thirst is appeased by the first thing which offers itself.