It was a merry party, seated on the gaily-trapped mules, with an idle young midshipman to make mischief, and all in spirits to enjoy his nonsense, in the exhilaration of the mountain air blowing freshly from the snowy summits which seemed to rise like walls before them.  The steaming, misty, relaxing atmosphere of Lima was left behind, and with it many a care and vexation.  Mr. Ponsonby brought his mule to the side of his wife’s litter, and exchanged many a joke in Anglo-Spanish with her and the lieutenant; and Mr. Ward, his brow unfurrowed from counting-house cares, walked beside Mary’s mule, gathered each new flower for her, and listened to her narrative of some of the causes for which she was glad, with her own eyes, to see Tom Madison in his scene of action.

The first day of adventure they slept at a hacienda, surrounded with fields where numerous llamas were pasturing.  The next began the real mountain work; the rock looked like a wall before them, and the white summits were sharply defined against the blue sky.  The sharper air made Rosita shiver; but the English travellers congratulated themselves on something like a breeze, consoling them for the glow with which the sunbeams beat upon the rocks.  The palms and huge ferns had given place to pines, and these were growing more scanty.  Once or twice they met a brown Indian, robed in a coloured blanket, with a huge straw hat, from beneath which he gazed with curious, though gentle eyes, upon the cavalcade.  By-and-by, looking like a string of ants descending a perpendicular wall, Mary beheld a row of black specks slowly moving.  She was told that these were the mules bringing down the metal in panniers—­the only means of communication, until, as the lieutenant promised, a perpendicular railroad should be invented.  The electricity of the atmosphere made jokes easily pass current.  The mountain was ‘only’ one of the spurs of the Andes, a mere infant among the giants; but, had it been set down in Europe, Mont Blanc must have hid his diminished head; and the view was better than on some of the more enormous neighbours, which were both further inland, and of such height, that to gaze from them was ’like looking from an air-balloon into vacancy.’  Whereas here Mary had but to turn her head, as her mule steadily crept round the causeway—­a legacy of the Incas—­to behold the expanse of the Pacific, a sheet of glittering light in the sunshine, the horizon line raised so high, that the first moment it gave her a sense of there being something wrong with her eye, before the feeling of infinity rushed upon her.