Our guide, the enthusiastic Caceres, declared that we had now gone far enough. As it was beginning to rain and the road from there on was “worse than anything we had as yet experienced,” he said it would be better to camp for the night in an abandoned hut near by. His opinion was eagerly welcomed by two of the party, young men from Abancay, who were having their first real adventure, but the two _Yankis_ decided that it was best to reach the river if possible. Caceres finally consented, and aided by the dare-devil Castillo, we commenced a descent that for tortuous turns and narrow escapes beat anything we had yet seen. Just as darkness came on, we encountered a large tree that had so fallen across our path as completely to block all progress. It seemed as though we must return to the hut. Half an hour’s work enabled us to pass this obstacle only to reach a part of the hillside where an avalanche had recently occurred. Here even the mules and horses trembled with fright as we led them across a mass of loose earth and stones which threatened to give way at any moment. Only two weeks previously, two mules had been lost here. Their crossing had started a renewal of the avalanche which had taken the poor animals along with it.
An hour after dark we came out on a terrace. The roar of the river was so great that we could scarcely hear Caceres shouting out that our troubles were now over and “all the rest was level ground.” This turned out to be only his little joke. We were still a thousand feet above the river and a path cut in
[Illustration: A CHASM DOWN WHICH PLUNGED A SMALL CATARACT]
[Illustration: THE WONDERFUL CAÑON OF THE APURIMAC]
the face of a precipice had yet to be negotiated. In broad daylight we should never had dared to ride down the tortuous trail that led from the terrace to the bank of the river. But as it was quite dark and we were quite innocent of any danger we readily followed the cheery voice of our guide. The path is what is known as a corkscrew and descended the wall of the cañon by means of short turns each twenty feet long. At one end of each turn was the precipice, while at the other was a chasm down which plunged a small cataract which had a clear fall of seven hundred feet. Half way down the path my mule stopped, trembling, and I dismounted to find that in the darkness he had walked off the trail and had slid down the cliff to a ledge. How to get him back was a problem. It is not easy to back an animal up a steep hill, and there was no room in which to turn him around. It was such a narrow escape that when I got safely back onto the trail, I decided to walk the rest of the way and let the mule go first, preferring to have him fall over the precipice alone if that were necessary.