and his patient insertion of one hundred and sixty-six “fathom-markers”!  The bottom of the lake was only four feet away from the bottom of my boat!  After three or four days of strenuous rowing up and down the eighteen miles of the lake’s length, and back and forth across the seventeen miles of its width, I never succeeded in wetting Watkins’s first marker!  Several hundred soundings failed to show more than five feet of water anywhere.  Possibly if we had come in the rainy season we might at least have wet one marker, but at the time of our visit (November, 1911), the lake had a maximum depth of 4 1/2 feet.  The satisfaction of making this slight contribution to geographic knowledge was, I fear, lost in the chagrin of not finding a really noteworthy body of water.

Who would have thought that so long a lake could be so shallow?  However, my feelings were soothed by remembering the story of the captain of a man-of-war who was once told that the salt lake near one of the red hills between Honolulu and Pearl Harbor was reported by the natives to be “bottomless.”  He ordered one of the ship’s heavy boats to be carried from the shore several miles inland to the salt lake, at great expenditure of strength and labor.  The story told me in my boyhood does not say how much sounding line was brought.  Anyhow, they found this “fathomless” body of water to be not more than fifteen feet deep.

Notwithstanding my disappointment at the depth of Parinacochas, I was very glad that we had brought the little folding boat, for it enabled me to float gently about among the myriads of birds which use the shallow waters of the lake as a favorite feeding ground; pink flamingoes, white gulls, small “divers,” large black ducks, sandpipers, black ibis, teal ducks, and large geese.  On the banks were ground owls and woodpeckers.  It is not surprising that the natives should have named this body of water “Parinacochas” (Parina = “flamingo,” cochas = “lake").  The flamingoes are here in incredible multitudes; they far outnumber all other birds, and as I have said, actually make the shallow waters of the lake look pink.  Fortunately they had not been hunted for their plumage and were not timid.  After two days of familiarity with the boat they were willing to let me approach within twenty yards before finally taking wing.  The coloring, in this land of drab grays and browns, was a delight to the eye.  The head is white, the beak black, the neck white shading into salmon-pink; the body pinkish white on the back, the breast white, and the tail salmon-pink.  The wings are salmon-pink in front, but the tips and the under-parts are black.  As they stand or wade in the water their general appearance is chiefly pink-and-white.  When they rise from the water, however, the black under-parts of the wings become strikingly conspicuous and cause a flock of flying flamingoes to be a wonderful contrast in black-and-white.  When flying, the flamingo seems to keep his head moving steadily forward at an even pace, although the ropelike neck undulates with the slow beating of the wings.  I could not be sure that it was not an optical delusion.  Nevertheless, I thought the heavy body was propelled irregularly, while the head moved forward at uniform speed, the difference being caught up in the undulations of the neck.