Looking back, the view, if not equally imposing, is nevertheless as interesting. We can trace the windings of the Desaguadero through its shallow valley until lost in the distance in the direction of Lake Aullagas. There, too, is the broad, plain of Santiago over which we have toiled, its inequalities scarcely discernible from our elevation. Beyond it, distinct, white, grand, and solemn, the volcanic peaks of Sahama, Pomarape, and Tacora, the pinnacles of the Cordilleras, and themselves reflecting their silver crests in the Pacific.

marshy ground, near the base of the high ridge | high table-land or puno succeeding, and a range that separates the valley of the Desaguadero of mountains beyond, which look small only from that of Tiahuanaco. Its inhabitants are from contrast with their snow-crowned neighall Indians of the Aymara family, who eke out bors. a scanty subsistence as shepherds and cultivators of the bitter variety of potato to which I have alluded, and which grows on the sunny hill-sides. Like San Andres it has a great church in good repair, and containing some large pictures, of the excellence of which we were unable to judge under the "dim religious light" that stole through the alabaster windows. Having no place of refuge we rode direct to the house of the cura, who was neither a drunkard nor an adulterer, and in both these respects an exception to the wretches who in general profane the sanctuaries of God in Bolivia and Southern and Central Peru. He was an intelligent, meek, earnest man, who did for us all that we were unable to do for ourselves, and made no apologies for deficiencies which were obviously inseparable from his position. We passed the evening pleasantly in his society. He showed us through his church, in which five times the population of his village might easily assemble, and pointed out the beauties of its architecture with a faint flush of pride. His hectic cheek and rasping cough told us then that he verged on the close of his earthly career; and we were not surprised, although we were grieved, to hear a few months later, and before we left the Sierra, that the good cura of Jesus de Machaca, Manuel Valdivia, was dead.

Nowhere else in the world, perhaps, can a panorama so diversified and grand be obtained from a single point of view. The whole great table-land of Peru and Bolivia, at its widest part, with its own system of waters, its own rivers and lakes, its own plains and mountains, all framed in by the ranges of the Cordillera and the Andes, is presented like a map before the adventurous visitor who climbs to the apacheta of Tiahuanaco. Grand, severe, almost sullen is the aspect which nature presents here. We stand in the centre of a scenery and a terrestrial system which seems to be in spirit, as well as in fact, lifted above the rest of the world, coldly and calmly looking down upon it, sharing none of its sympathies, and disturbed by none of its alarms. The silent, wondering vicuña, the gliding llama, the great condor circling high up in the air, or sailing down toward us as if in menace, the absence of forests, the clouds surging up from the dank plains and forests of Brazil, only to be precipitated and dissolved by the snowy barriers which they can not pass, the clear metallic blue sky above, the keen sunlight, the awful silence-all impress the traveler with the feeling that he is no longer in the world that he has known before. There is nothing with which he is familiar, nothing in the way of association or suggestive of other scenes. Not an unfitting region this for the development of an original civilization like that which has carved its memorials in massive stones, and left them in the plain of Tiahuanaco at our feet, and of which no tradition remains except that they were the work of giants, who reared them in a single night.

It was from this point that we obtained our first view of Lake Titicaca, or rather of the lower and lesser lake of Tiquina, with its high islands and promontories, and shores belted with reeds. It was here, too, that the great snowy chain of the Andes, of which we had only caught glimpses before, burst on our sight in all its majesty. Dominating the Lake is the massive bulk of Illampu, or Sorata, the crown The descent into the valley or plain of Tiaof the continent, the highest mountain of Amer-huanaco is more abrupt than in the direction ica, rivaling, if not equaling in height, the monarchs of the Himalaya. Observers vary in their estimates and calculations of its altitude from 25,000 to 27,000 feet; my own estimates place it at not far from 26,000. Extending southward from this is an uninterrupted chain of nevados, or snowy mountains, nowhere less than 20,000 feet in height, which terminates in the great mountain of Illamini, 24,500 feet in altitude. Between the eminence on which we stand and these gigantic mountains is, first, the deep valley and plain of Tiahuanaco, with a

of the Desaguadero, and the most reckless travelers find it requisite to dismount and proceed on foot. It was dark when we struck the edge of the plain, and ascertained that we had yet nearly four leagues to go before reaching the village of Tiahuanaco. This border of the plain receives the wash of the adjacent ridge, and is covered thickly with rocky debris, and seamed with shallow torrent beds. To get at the soil and protect the ground when once reclaimed, the stones in many places have been heaped together in mounds, or long, heavy

VIEW OF LAKE TITICACA AND ILLAMPU, THE OROWN OF THE ANDES.

ridges, capable of resisting or diverting the rush | able swell of land, free from stones, and of of the waters descending from the hills. This which considerable patches were broken up for work seems to have been in great part, if not crops; and a league and a half further, after wholly, performed by the ancient inhabitants; fording a shallow stream of clear running water, showing that here, as every where else, they we reached the village of Tiahuanaco itself, sitwere avaricious of arable soil, and spared nei-uated upon another slight elevation, in a wellther time nor labor to rescue the scantiest por- chosen position. The narrow, unlighted streets, tion of it to cultivation. lined by low huts of rough stones laid in clay, cov

At a distance of two leagues from the west-ered with thatch, destitute of windows, and enern border of the plain we came to a consider-tered only by low and narrow doorways, closed

for the most part with raw hides, were silent and deserted; the wretched inhabitants have hardly fuel wherewith to cook their scanty food, and are fain to slink away into their dark and squalid habitations as soon as the sun withdraws his genial rays. The traveler who emerges in the morning, blue and benumbed from his bed on the ground in an unventilated, gloomy hut of the Sierra, where the pigs are not his most unpleasant companions, to thaw himself into life on the sunny side of the wretched chosa that has sheltered him, will readily comprehend how the people of Peru became worshipers of the

sun.

from the cura, on his return probably from some nocturnal adventure. His face was red and bloated, deeply scarred by small-pox, but retaining traces of original manly beauty. He was quite drunk and not very coherent, and when we began to question him about the celebrated ancient ruins of the neighborhood he became suddenly silent, and drew me into a dark corner of the court-yard, where, in a mysterious whisper, he told me that he knew all about the tapadas, or hidden treasures, and that we could count on his guidance in obtaining them, for an equitable division of the spoils. It was in vain I protested that we were not money-diggers; he could not conceive how any stranger should evince an interest in the "vestiges of the Gentiles" not founded on the hope of discovering treasure among them. And here I may mention that throughout all of our explorations, in all parts of Peru, whether in the city or in the field, we were supposed to be searching for tapadas, and were constantly watched and followed by people who hoped to

We were not long in finding the plaza of Tiahuanaco, where a faint light shining out from a single portada in front of the church gave us the first evidence that the town possessed inhabitants. The house proved to be the posta, and the most we could learn from the saturnine Indians in charge was that the master of the post was absent. They neither invited us to come in, nor made any movement to assist us when we dismounted, but disappeared | get some clew to the whereabouts of the treasone by one into dark dormitories, leaving us standing alone, hungry and cold, in the open court. However, the arrival of our arrieros, some of whom spoke Aymara, changed the aspect of affairs. They pushed open the door of the principal or travelers' apartment, and, piling the barley in stalk which it contained at one end, cleared a space for the single piece of furniture in the room-a broken table-and with imperative words and acts as emphatic, finally secured for us a dish of diluted chupe.

ures through our indications. Often, when engaged in surveys of fortifications or buildings, we found the marks left by us at night, to guide us in resuming our work in the morning, not only removed, but the earth deeply excavated below them. The ancient monuments of the country have suffered vastly more from the hands of treasure-seekers than from fanatic violence, time, and the elements combined. The work of destruction from this cause has been going on for three hundred years, and still act

BY A VIRGINIAN.

[Eleventh Paper.]