Andes.

Leaving Savaneta at dawn, and breakfasting at a wayside hut owned by an old negro, we struck about noon the Rio Charriguajaco, dashing down the mountains in hot haste for the Guayas. It was refreshing to look upon living waters for the first time since leaving the hills of our native country. Fording this stream we know not how many times, and winding through the dense forest in narrow paths often blockaded by laden donkeys that doggedly disputed the passage, we soon found ourselves slowly creeping up the Andes. We frequently met mountaineers on their way to Bodegas with loads of potatoes, peas, barley, fowls, eggs, etc. They are generally accompanied by their wives or daughters, who ride like the men, but with the knees tucked up higher. On the slippery tracks which traverse this western slope, bulls are often used as beasts of burden, the cloven hoofs enabling them to descend with great security. But mules are better than horses or asses. "That a hybrid (muses Darwin) should possess more reason, memory, obstinacy, social affection, powers of muscular endurance, and length of life than either of its parents, seems to indicate that art has here outdone nature."

Toward evening the ascent became rapid and the road horrible beyond conception, growing narrower and rougher as we advanced. Indeed, our way had long since ceased to be a road. In the dense forest, where sunshine never comes, rocks, mud, and fallen trees in rapid alternation macadamize the path, save where it turns up the bed of a babbling brook. In the comparatively level tracts, the equable step of the beasts has worn the soil into deep transverse ridges, called camellones, from their resemblance to the humps on a camel's back. In the precipitous parts the road is only a gully worn by the transit of men and beasts for ages, aided by torrents of water in the rainy season. As we ascend, this changes to a rocky staircase, so strait that one must throw up his legs to save them from being crushed, and so steep that horse and rider run the risk of turning a somersault. It is fearful to meet in a narrow defile, or where the road winds around the edge of a precipice, a drove of reckless donkeys and mules descending the mountain, urged on by the cries and lashes of the muleteers behind. Yet this has been the highway of Ecuadorian commerce for three hundred years. In vain we tried to reach the little village of Camino Real on the crest of the ridge; but the night was advancing rapidly, and crawling up such a road by starlight was not a little dangerous. So we put up at a miserable tambo, Pogyos by name. It was a mud hut of the rudest kind, windowless and unfloored; very clean, if it had been left to nature, but man and beast had rendered it intolerably filthy. Our hostess, a Quichua woman, with tattered garments, and hair disheveled and standing up as if electrified, set a kettle on three stones, and, making a fire under it, prepared for us a calabash of chicken and locro. Locro, the national dish in the mountains, is in plain English simply potato soup. Sitting on the ground, we partook of this refreshment by the aid of fingers and wooden spoons, enticing our appetites by the reflection that potato soup would support life. The unkempt Indian by our side, grinning in conscious pride over her successful cookery, did not aid us in this matter. Fire is used in Ecuador solely for culinary purposes, not for warmth. It is made at no particular spot on the mud floor, and there is no particular orifice for the exit of the smoke save the chinks in the wall. There is not a chimney in the whole republic. As the spare room in the establishment belonged to the women, we gentlemen slept on the ground outside, or on beds made of round poles. The night was piercingly cold. The wished-for morning came at last, and long before the sun looked over the mountains we were on our march. It was the same terrible road, running zigzag, or "quingo" fashion, up to Camino Real, where it was suddenly converted into a royal highway.

We were now fairly out of the swamps of the lowlands, and, though under the equator, out of the tropics too. The fresh mountain breeze and the chilly mists announced a change of climate.[12] Fevers and dysenteries, snakes and musquitoes, the plantain and the palm, we had left behind. Camino Real is a huddle of eight or ten dwellings perched on the summit of a sierra a thousand feet higher than the top of Mount Washington. The views from this stand-point compensate for all past troubles. The wild chaos of mountains on every side, broken by profound ravines, the heaps of ruins piled up during the lapse of geologic ages, the intense azure of the sky, and the kingly condor majestically wheeling around the still higher pinnacles, make up a picture rarely to be seen. Westward, the mountains tumble down into hills and spread out into plains, which, in the far distant horizon, dip into the great Pacific. The setting sun turns the ocean into a sheet of liquid fire. Long columns of purple light shoot up to the zenith, and as the last point of the sun sinks beneath the horizon, the stars rush out in full splendor; for at the equator day gives place to night with only an hour and twenty minutes of twilight. The mountains are Alpine, yet grander than the Alps; not so ragged as the granite peaks of Switzerland, but with rounder heads. The prospect down this occidental slope is diversified by deep valleys, lands-lides, and flowering trees. Magnificent are the views eastward,