They were turning the flank of the mountain, and losing the sunshine.  The evening air was almost chill, and the clearness such that they already saw the ragged height whither they were bound rising in craggy shattered grandeur, every flat space or gentler declivity covered with sheds and huts for the work-people, and cavernous mouths opening on the cliff-side.  Dark figures could be distinctly seen moving about; and as to the descending mules, they seemed to be close on the other side of a narrow ravine.  Rosita, who, now it came to the point, was not without fears of sleeping on the bare mountain-side, wanted to push on; she was sure they could arrive before night, but she was told that she knew nothing of mountain atmosphere; and she was not discontented with the bright fire and comfortable arrangements on which they suddenly came, after turning round a great shoulder of rock.  Mr. Robson and the sumpter-mules had quietly preceded them, and the gipsying on the Andes was likely to be not much less luxurious than an English pic-nic.  The negro cook had done his best; Mary made her father’s coffee, and Rosita was waited on to her satisfaction.  And when darkness came on, too early for English associations with warm days, the lights of the village at the mine glittered merrily, and, apparently, close at hand; and the stars above shone as Mary had never seen them, so marvellously large and bright, and the Magellan clouds so white and mysterious.  Mr. Ward came and told her some of the observations made on them by distinguished travellers; and after an earnest conversation, she sought her matted bed, with a pleasant feeling on her mind, as if she had been unusually near Louis’s world.

Clear, sharp, and cold was the air next day; the snow-fields glistened gloriously in the rising sun, and a rose-coloured mist seemed to rise from them.  Rosita was shown the unusual spectacle of hoar frost, and shiveringly profited by Mary’s ample provision of wraps.  The hill-sides were beyond conception desolate and bare.  Birds were an almost unknown race in Peru; and here even green things had departed, scarcely a tuft of blossom looking out on the face of the red and purple rock; and the exceeding stillness so awful, that even the boy-sailor scarce dared to speak above his breath.  Rosita began to repent of having come near so horrible a place; and when she put her head out of her litter, and beheld herself winding along a ledge projecting from the face of a sheer precipice, she would have begged to go back instantly; but her husband spoke in a voice of authority which subdued her; she drew in her head into her basket-work contrivance, and had recourse to vows to Sta Rosa of Lima of a chaplet of diamond roses, if she ever came safely down again.