to go to Cotahuasi. Had he known this, and also had he suspected the
trials that were before him on Mt. Coropuna, he probably would have
begged off--but I am anticipating.

On the 2d of October, Tucker, Hinckley, Corporal Gamarra and I left
Arequipa; Watkins followed a week later. The first stage of the
journey was by train from Arequipa to Vitor, a distance of thirty
miles. The arrieros sent the cargo along too. In addition to the
food-boxes we brought with us tents, ice axes, snowshoes, barometers,
thermometers, transit, fiber cases, steel boxes, duffle bags, and
a folding boat. Our pack train was supposed to have started from
Arequipa the day before. We hoped it would reach Vitor about the
same time that we did, but that was expecting too much of arrieros
on the first day of their journey. So we had an all-day wait near
the primitive little railway station.

We amused ourselves wandering off over the neighboring pampa and
studying the médanos, crescent-shaped sand dunes which are common in
the great coastal desert. One reads so much of the great tropical
jungles of South America and of wellnigh impenetrable forests that
it is difficult to realize that the West Coast from Ecuador, on
the north, to the heart of Chile, on the south, is a great desert,
broken at intervals by oases, or valleys whose rivers, coming
from melting snows of the Andes, are here and there diverted for
purposes of irrigation. Lima, the capital of Peru, is in one of the
largest of these oases. Although frequently enveloped in a damp fog,
the Peruvian coastal towns are almost never subjected to rain. The
causes of this phenomenon are easy to understand. Winds coming from
the east, laden with the moisture of the Atlantic Ocean and the
steaming Amazon Basin, are rapidly cooled by the eastern slopes of