each Arequipa
that night, but his enforced departure not only shattered his own hopes
of climbing Coropuna, but also made us wonder how we were going to have
the necessary three-men-on-the-rope when we reached the glaciers. To
be sure, there was the corporal--but would he go? Indians do not like
snow mountains. Packing up the tent again, we resumed our course over
the desert.

The oasis of Sihuas, another beautiful garden in the bottom of a
huge canyon, was reached about four o'clock in the afternoon. We
should have been compelled to camp in the open with the arrieros had
not the parish priest invited us to rest in the cool shade of his
vine-covered arbor. He graciously served us with cakes and sweet
native wine, and asked us to stay as long as we liked. The desert
of Majes, which now lay ahead of us, is perhaps the widest, hottest,
and most barren in this region. Our arrieros were unwilling to cross
it in the daytime. They said it was forty-five miles between water
and water. The next day we enjoyed the hospitality of our kindly host
until after supper.

So sure are the inhabitants of these oases that it is not going to
rain that their houses are built merely as a shelter against the sun
and wind. They are made of the canes that grow in the jungles of the
larger river bottoms, or along the banks of irrigating ditches. On the
roof the spaces between the canes are filled with adobe, sun-dried
mud. It is not necessary to plaster the sides of the houses, for it
is pleasant to let the air have free play, and it is amusing to look
out through the cracks and see everything that is passing.

That evening we saddled in the moonlight. Slowly we climbed out of the
valley, to spend the night jogging steadily, hour after hour, across
the desert. As the moon was setting we entered a hilly region, and
at sunrise found ourselves in the midst of a tumbled mass of enormous
sand dunes--the result of hundreds of medanos blown across the pampa
of Majes and deposited along the border of the valley. It took us
three hours to wind slowly down from the level of the desert to a
point where we could see the great canyon, a mile deep and two miles
across. Its steep sides are of various colored rocks and sand. The
bottom is a bright green oasis through which flows the rapid Majes
River, too deep to be forded even in the dry season. A very large
part of the flood plain of the unruly river is not cultivated, and
consists of a wild jungle, diffic