impossible to sleep, on account of the myriads of gnats.

The next day we had a short ride along the western side of the valley
to the town of Aplao, the capital of the province of Castilla, called
by its present inhabitants "Majes," although on Raimondi's map that
name is applied only to the river and the neighboring desert. In 1865,
at the time of his visit, it had a bad reputation for disease. Now
it seems more healthy. The sub-prefect of Castilla had been informed
by telegraph of our coming, and invited us to an excellent dinner.

The people of Majes are largely of mixed white and Indian
ancestry. Many of them appeared to be unusually businesslike. The
proprietor of one establishment was a great admirer of American shoes,
the name of which he pronounced in a manner that puzzled us for a
long time. "W" is unknown in Spanish and the letters "a," "l," and "k"
are never found in juxtaposition. When he asked us what we thought of
"Valluck-ofair'," accenting strongly the last syllable, we could not
imagine what he meant. He was equally at a loss to understand how we
could be so stupid as not to recognize immediately the well-advertised
name of a widely known shoe.

At Majes we observed cotton, which is sent to the mills at Arequipa,
alfalfa, highly prized as fodder for pack animals, sugar cane, from
which aguardiente, or white rum, is made, and grapes. It is said that
the Majes vineyards date back to the sixteenth century, and that some
of the huge, buried, earthenware wine jars now in use were made as far
back as the reign of Philip II. The presence of so much wine in the
community does not seem to have a deleterious effect on the natives,
who were not only hospitable but energetic--far more so, in fact,
than the natives of towns in the high Andes, where the intense cold