“There is neither presumption nor impropriety in your wish,” returned the guide. “I told you at starting that we should pursue a devious route, for reasons which are immaterial to you, but there is no reason why I should not explain that at present I am diverging for only a few miles from our track to visit a locality—a cottage—which is sacred to me. After that we will turn eastward until we reach the head-waters of streams that will conduct us towards our journey’s end.”
With this explanation he was obliged to rest content, for Pedro spoke like one who did not care to be questioned. Indeed there was an unusually absent air about him, seeing which Lawrence drew rein and fell back until he found himself alongside of Quashy.
Always ready—nay, eager—for sympathetic discourse, the negro received his young master with a bland, expansive, we might almost say effusive, smile.
“Well, massa, how’s you gittin’ along now?”
“Pretty well, Quashy. How do you?”
“Oh! fuss-rate, massa—only consid’rable obercome wid surprise.”
“What surprises you?”
“De way we’s agwine, to be sure. Look dar.” He pointed towards the towering mountain peaks and wild precipices that closed in the narrow glen or gorge up which they were slowly proceeding.
“In all our trabels we’s nebber come to a place like dat. It looks like de fag end ob creation. You couldn’t git ober de mountain-tops ’cept you had wings, an’ you couldn’t climb ober de pres’pisses ’cep you was a monkey or a skirl—though it am bery lubly, no doubt.”
The negro’s comments were strictly correct, though somewhat uncouthly expressed. The valley was apparently surrounded in all directions by inaccessible precipices, and the white peaks of the Andes towered into the skies at its head. Within rugged setting lay a fine stretch of undulating land, diversified by crag and hillock, lake and rivulet, with clustering shrubs and trees clinging to the cliffs, and clothing the mountain slopes in rich, and, in many places, soft luxuriance. It was one of those scenes of grandeur and loveliness in profound solitude which tend to raise in the thoughtful mind the perplexing but not irreverent question, “Why did the good and bountiful Creator form such places of surpassing beauty to remain for thousands of years almost, if not quite, unknown to man?”