"THE HEART OF THE ANDES."
We of the northern hemisphere have a geographical belief in the Andes as an unsteady family of mountains in South America,—a continent where earthquakes shake the peaks and revolutions the people, where giant condors soar and swoop, where volcanoes hurl up orbed masses of fiery smoke by day and flare luridly by night, where silver may hang in tubers at the roots of any bush, and where statesmen protocol, and soldiers keep up a runaway fight, for the honor and profit of administering guano. Long ago, in the dim cycles, Incas watched the snowy Andes for the daily coming of their God, the Sun. Then the barbaric music of those morning oblations died away, and, except for Potosi, the Andes might have been quite forgotten. First again we hear of them as a scientific convenience. That mysterious entity, the Equator, hung, like a more tenacious Atlantic cable, from peak to peak. French savans climbed and measured it, and found it droll to stand at noon on their own shadows no bigger than dinner-plates. The world
