While I was raising blisters and frightening oxen and flamingoes, Mr. Tucker triangulated the Parinacochas Basin, making the first accurate map of this vicinity.  As he carried his theodolite from point to point he often stirred up little ground owls, who gazed at him with solemn, reproachful looks.  And they were not the only individuals to regard his activities with suspicion and dislike.  Part of my work was to construct signal stations by piling rocks at conspicuous points on the well-rounded hills so as to enable the triangulation to proceed as rapidly as possible.  During the night some of these signal stations would disappear, torn down by the superstitious shepherds who lived in scattered clusters of huts and declined to have strange gods set up in their vicinity.  Perhaps they thought their pastures were being preempted.  We saw hundreds of their sheep and cattle feeding on flat lands formerly the bed of the lake.  The hills of the Parinacochas Basin are bare of trees, and offer some pasturage.  In some places they are covered with broken rock.  The grass was kept closely cropped by the degenerate descendants of sheep brought into the country during Spanish colonial days.  They were small in size and mostly white in color, although there were many black ones.  We were told that the sheep were worth about fifty cents apiece here.

On our first arrival at Parinacochas we were left severely alone by the shepherds; but two days later curiosity slowly overcame their shyness, and a group of young shepherds and shepherdesses gradually brought their grazing flocks nearer and nearer the camp, in order to gaze stealthily on these strange visitors, who lived in a cloth house, actually moved over the forbidding waters of the lake, and busied themselves from day to day with strange magic, raising and lowering a glittering glass eye on a tripod.  The women wore dresses of heavy material, the skirts reaching halfway from knee to ankle.  In lieu of hats they had small variegated shawls, made on hand looms, folded so as to make a pointed bonnet over the head and protect the neck and shoulders from sun and wind.  Each woman was busily spinning with a hand spindle, but carried her baby and its gear and blankets in a hammock or sling attached to a tump-line that went over her head.  These sling carry-alls were neatly woven of soft wool and decorated with attractive patterns.  Both women and boys were barefooted.  The boys wore old felt hats of native manufacture, and coats and long trousers much too large for them.

At one end of the upland basin rises the graceful cone of Mt.  Sarasara.  The view of its snow-capped peak reflected in the glassy waters of the lake in the early morning was one long to be remembered.  Sarasara must once have been much higher than it is at present.  Its volcanic cone has been sharply eroded by snow and ice.  In the days of its greater altitude, and consequently wider snow fields, the melting snows probably served to make Parinacochas