Thus equipped, the departure was made from Lima on the morning of August 20, and the three adventurers were accompanied as far as Chosica by Harvey’s brother Louis and by Carl Saunders, their chum, who stood on the railway platform in the little mountain town and waved a God-speed until the train pulled out of sight.
The Oroya railroad is one of the seven wonders of Peru, and no work by civil engineers in all the world so challenges admiration. It rises from the sea and threads the gorges of the Rimac, creeping on ledges that have been blasted from out the solid rock, crossing bridges that seem suspended in air, and boring through tunnels over which rest giant mountains. In places the cliffs on which rails are laid so overhang the river far below that a stone let fall from a car window will drop on the opposite side of the stream. From the coast to the summit there is not an inch of down grade, and in seventy-eight miles an altitude of 12,178 feet is attained. Sixty-three tunnels are passed through. Placed end to end they would be 21,000 feet in length, so that for four miles of this wonderful journey one is burrowing in the bowels of mountains.
At one point the travellers stood on the car platform and saw ahead of them the mouth of a tunnel, then, looking up the face of the precipice they saw another black opening that seemed the size of a barrel; higher still was a third, no larger in appearance than a silver dollar; yet higher, as high as a bird would fly, a fourth, resembling the eye of a needle. Four tunnels, one above the other!
They would enter the first, wind around on ledges, pass through the second, wind again, the third, wind again, and before entering the fourth, look down from the train platform along the face of the precipice and see the entrances to the three holes through which they had passed. They were threading mountains, and always moving toward the summit.
In this wild journey they passed over thirty bridges that spanned chasms, the most remarkable of them all being the iron bridge of Verrugas, which crosses a chasm 580 feet wide and rests on three piers, the central one being 252 feet high.
The noonday meal was taken at Matucana, in the railway station house, and a half hour later they were on the way again, and all three stood on the platform of the rear car, watching the scenery, which every moment grew in grandeur. As the train wound around a ledge, like a huge iron snake, they saw far beneath a little lake of blue, bordered by willows. Even as they looked, clouds rolled out and hid the water and the willows. So they were above the clouds! Yet above them were other clouds, of fleecy white, drifting and breaking against the gray masses of stone that rose ever and ever at the sides of them and in front of them!