After three weeks in Lima wita recurring drizzle and only two slimpses of sun, my friends proposed a trip over this railway to show me mountains bathed in sunshine, and down into the warm forest region on the Eastern foothills, where the rivers drain into the Amazon.
Our party consisted of the wife of the British Naval Attache, an It doctor, a Swiss medical student, myself, and our conversation was a triangular sort of affair, conducted in French, Spanish and English. We were lent @ comfortable coach called "Atahualpa," after the hapless Inca King done to death by Pizarro. The boy in attendance was a Japanese-looking youth named Castilla, while the cook, an elderly negro was 0 "British object" from Jamaica.
We left one evening for Chosica, mountain resort 2,800 feet above ti ea, passing on the way a large sugar ranch and factory owned by a wealthy Chinese. Far below us were the sullen clouds overhanging Lima, The sky was a luminous violet strewn with stars. A young moon whitened landscape as if with snow. A sound of rushing waters flowed ceasclesaly as the Rimac swept through a wide yock-strewn bed below the railway track, Great shoulders of mountains Toomed vast and sombre above Across a suspension bridge lay villas and bungalows amid red-flowering pepper-trees, oleanders, eucalyptus ard towering regal palms, the lutter like colossal feather dusters.
That Mountain Sickn Our coach was to wait at Chosica until three in the morning, when it was to be attached to a slow goods train. This was with a view to our avoiding sorroche, that mysterious mountain sickness that seizes people unaware, that often passes over the weak and lays the strongest low, Our kind friends had thought that in proceeding slowly up the heights We might escape sorroche.
Sleep was difficult. All night trains would rush clattering past, or} engines, like deep-breathing monsters, snort outside, or with clang-bells' would shunt to and fro, But fat last we were off.
'When T awoke, the train was wird-Ing among tall gray mountains, their} tops gilded with sunlight, the track Picking its way through' masses of boulders strewn about the valley. High up in the crevices of the mountains sprouted fantustie cactus monstrous fingers, the colour of dus! searcely distinguishable from the rock.
While we were at breaktust, the train was performing prodigious feats of leger-de-main. The track festooned itself in loops up the face of stupendous cliffs overhanging! deep canyons. We rushed from one tunnel into another. We clattered over dizzy bridges suspended, as it were, in space. The gorge would then emerge into a broad open valley where lay a pretty village. complete ith church and plaza. We would; in spiva} loops about it until lay extended far beneath us, as if viewed from an aeroplane.
Sometimes we saw a troop of Mamas, (pronounced varnas") stepping delicately along a mountain path, their heads tied up with gay ribbons, looking graceful compared with the. huge Chinese camel. Simpatico!" was the adjective auc friends gave to them. They are used altitudes of the Andes, above 10,000 a3 beasts of burden in the high
eet.
The Camel's Fair Cousin The Mama is a much smaller! creature than the camel, its body not as large as the donkey's. Bur it holds its long neck in the same disdainful poise as the camel. I was, told by a Leeds Professor who came out as expert to the Peruvian Ex-1 Sheep Farm that thei the true original camel, but that in process of time, as. encountered the dozerrs of Africa and Asia, it gradually became larger and developed humps to suit its environment.
At a little mining station, we saw Indian women in vivid blouses and full skirts of scarlet, orange or blue two or three, reaching to the ground like ancient crinoline:
evitable Panama hats on thei These hats, by the way, are!
Peru and Ecuador, and are sent to Panama for sale. Hence their name, Many women had spindles in their hands and were twisting vicuna yarn as they walked long. A man drove x horse before laden with the raw uncovered weave of an ox, hanging down on. either side of the beast. Here and there on the mountain side were plain wooden crosses, marking where some Indian employee of the railway had met with death,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.