“Ah!” said Luis; “now you know how we can tell the time without a watch, how we know the number of miles we have walked without counting our steps. When you feel to want new coca-leaves, thirty-five minutes have gone by; add the ten minutes during which you found no effect from them, and you observe that three-quarters of an hour has expired. In that time we walk, at the present rate, five miles.” He might have added that, if abused, the coca habit is as pernicious and as degrading as opium-taking.
“It will be five miles no longer now,” said Filipe, interrupting. “Quick; blind the mules, Luis!”
They immediately began to bustle about like seamen in a gale of wind, and, in a few minutes, each of the five mules had a cloth tied over his eyes. There was soon no need to ask why. The slope they had been ascending had become a level strip—literally a strip. To the left of them the sailors saw a sheer wall of rock, rising perhaps a hundred feet, while to the right, not more than eight feet from it, was the edge 124 of a precipice. Used as they both were to overcoming inclinations to giddiness or fear, they shuddered involuntarily as they cast their eyes over the brink and found that they could see no bottom to the abyss. Yet the Jeveros put themselves on the mules’ outer side, one leading a string of three, the other two, and walking heedlessly within a couple of feet of the precipice.
To add to the gruesomeness of the neighbourhood, a weird, wailing cry began to rise from the high ledge above their heads, at the sound of which the Jeveros crossed themselves and mumbled a prayer.
“What is it?” asked the midshipman, not without a little touch of awe.
“Alma perdida!” said Luis, reverently lowering his voice. The words meant “a lost soul,” but the boy was unaware of that, and Smyth did not think a mountain-ledge, such as this, quite the right place to choose for enlightening him. Used to Spanish and now to Indian superstition, he guessed—and rightly—that the cry was that of some bird, probably peculiar to the Andes; and he questioned Filipe, who was walking at his mule’s head.
“Yes; it is a bird. It passes its time in bewailing the dead, and the sins which they have committed.”
“It will have a chance of bewailing its own death,” said the lieutenant peevishly, “as soon as I can get a shot at it,” at which the guides betrayed as much horror as Smyth himself would have shown had they proposed using an albatross as a target.
“What are we going to do if we meet another string of mules along here?” he asked.