This strange history, told with profound earnestness, was enough to make any one laugh, but Marcoy could not be blind to its side of oppression and tyranny.  This was the way, then, that the humble and primitive gobernador, who had presented himself to the travelers barefoot, was enriching himself by the knaveries of office!  Marcoy could not take heart to inform Juan of Aragon of the devastation behind him, but on the other hand he resolved to correct the abuse on his return by appeal, if necessary, to the prefect of Cuzco.

A frightful night in a deserted hut on a site called Jimiro—­where Marcoy had for mattress the legs of one of the porters, and for pillow the back of a bark-hunter—­followed the exodus from Sausipata.  The Guarapascana, the Saniaca, the Chuntapunco, flowing into the Cconi on opposite sides, were successively left behind our adventurers, and they bowed for an instant before the tomb of a stranger, “a German from Germany,” as Pepe Garcia said, “who pretended to know the language of the Chunchos, and who interpreted for himself, but who starved in the wilderness near the heap of stones you see.”  Leaving this resting-place of an interpreter who had interpreted so little, the party attained a stream of rather unusual importance.  The reputed gold-bearing river of Ouitubamba rolled from its tunnel before them, exciting the most visionary schemes in the mind of Colonel Perez, to whom its auriferous reputation was familiar.  Nothing would do but that the California process of “panning” must be carried out in these Peruvian waters, and the peons, multum reluctantes, were summoned to the task, with all the crow-bars and shovels possessed by the expedition, supplemented by certain sauce-pans and dishes hypothecated from the culinary department.  The issue of the stream from under a crown of indigenous growths was the site of this financial speculation.  Pepe Garcia was placed at the head of the enterprise.  A long ditch was dug, revealing milky quartz, ochres and clay.  The deceptive hue of the yellow earth made the search a long and tantalizing one.  At the moment when the colonel, attracted by something glistening in the large frying-pan which he was agitating at the edge of the stream, uttered an exclamation which drew all heads into the cavity of his receptacle, an answering sound from the heavens caused everybody suddenly to look up.  An equatorial storm had gathered unnoticed over their heads.  In a few minutes a solid sheet of warm rain, accompanied by a furious tornado sweeping through the valley, caused whites and Indians to scatter as if for their lives.  The golden dream of Colonel Perez and the similar vision entertained by Pepe Garcia were dissipated promptly by this answer of the elements.  On attaining the neighboring sheds of Maniri the gold—­seekers abandoned their implements without remark to the services of the cooks, and betook themselves to wringing out their stockings as if they had never dreamed of walking in silver slippers through the streets of Cuzco.  They made no further attempt to wring gold from the mouth of the Ouitubamba.  As for Maniri, it was the last site or human resting-place of any, the very most trivial, kind before the opening of the utter wilderness which proceeded to accompany the course of the Cconi River.