mpossible to secure any carriers. Apparently this
was due in part to that love of freedom which had led them to abandon
the more comfortable towns for a frontier village where landlords
could not call on them for forced labor. Consequently, before the
arrival of any such striking manifestations of official authority as
our gendarmes, the gobernador and his friend Mogrovejo proposed to
put in the day craftily commandeering the services of a half-dozen
sturdy Indians. Their methods will be described presently.

Leaving modern Vilcabamba, we crossed the flat, marshy bottom of an
old glaciated valley, in which one of our mules got thoroughly mired
while searching for the succulent grasses which cover the treacherous
bog. Fording the Vilcabamba River, which here is only a tiny brook,
we climbed out of the valley and turned westward. On the mountains
above us were vestiges of several abandoned mines. It was their
discovery in 1572 or thereabouts which brought Ocampo and the first
Spanish settlers to this valley. Raimondi says that he found here
cobalt, nickel, silver-bearing copper ore, and lead sulphide. He
does not mention any gold-bearing quartz. It may have been exhausted
long before his day. As to the other minerals, the difficulties of
transportation are so great that it is not likely that mining will
be renewed here for many years to come.

At the top of the pass we turned to look back and saw a long chain
of snow-capped mountains towering above and behind the town of
Vilcabamba. We searched in vain for them on our maps. Raimondi,
followed by the Royal Geographical Society, did not leave room
enough for such a range to exist between the rivers Apurimac and
Urubamba. Mr. Hendriksen determined our longitude to be 73 deg. west,
and our latitude to be 13 deg. 8' south. Yet according to the latest map
of this region, published in the preceding year, this was the very
position of the river Apurimac itself, near its junction with the river
Pampas. We ought to have been swimming "the Great Speaker." Actually
we were on top of a lofty mountain pass surrounded by high peaks and
glaciers. The mystery was finally solved by Mr. Bumstead in 1912, when
he determined the Apurimac and the Urubamba to be thirty miles farther
apart than any one had supposed. His surveys opened an unexplored
region, 1500 square miles in extent, whose very existence had not been
guessed before 1911. It proved to be one of the largest undescribed
glaciate