We were anxious to make an early start for Conservidayoc, but it was first necessary for our Indians to prepare food for the ten days’ journey ahead of them.  Guzman’s wife, and I suppose the wives of our other carriers, spent the morning grinding chuno (frozen potatoes) with a rocking stone pestle on a flat stone mortar, and parching or toasting large quantities of sweet corn in a terra-cotta olla.  With chuno and tostado, the body of the sheep, and a small quantity of coca leaves, the Indians professed themselves to be perfectly contented.  Of our own provisions we had so small a quantity that we were unable to spare any.  However, it is doubtful whether the Indians would have liked them as much as the food to which they had long been accustomed.

Toward noon, all the Indian carriers but one having arrived, and the rain having partly subsided, we started for Conservidayoc.  We were told that it would be possible to use the mules for this day’s journey.  San Fernando, our first stop, was “seven leagues” away, far down in the densely wooded Pampaconas Valley.  Leaving the village we climbed up the mountain back of Guzman’s hut and followed a faint trail by a dangerous and precarious route along the crest of the ridge.  The rains had not improved the path.  Our saddle mules were of little use.  We had to go nearly all the way on foot.  Owing to cold rain and mist we could see but little of the deep canyon which opened below us, and into which we now began to descend through the clouds by a very steep, zigzag path, four thousand feet to a hot tropical valley.  Below the clouds we found ourselves near a small abandoned clearing.  Passing this and fording little streams, we went along a very narrow path, across steep slopes, on which maize had been planted.  Finally we came to another little clearing and two extremely primitive little shanties, mere shelters not deserving to be called huts; and this was San Fernando, the end of the mule trail.  There was scarcely room enough in them for our six carriers.  It was with great difficulty we found and cleared a place for our tent, although its floor was only seven feet square.  There was no really flat land at all.

At 8:30 P.M.  August 13, 1911, while lying on the ground in our tent, I noticed an earthquake.  It was felt also by the Indians in the near-by shelter, who from force of habit rushed out of their frail structure and made a great disturbance, crying out that there was a temblor.  Even had their little thatched roof fallen upon them, as it might have done during the stormy night which followed, they were in no danger; but, being accustomed to the stone walls and red tiled roofs of mountain villages where earthquakes sometimes do very serious harm, they were greatly excited.  The motion seemed to me to be like a slight shuffle from west to east, lasting three or four seconds, a gentle rocking back and forth, with eight or ten vibrations.  Several weeks later, near Huadquina, we happened to stop at the Colpani telegraph office.  The operator said he had felt two shocks on August 13th—­one at five o’clock, which had shaken the books off his table and knocked over a box of insulators standing along a wall which ran north and south.  He said the shock which I had felt was the lighter of the two.