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After passing the narrow affluent after which the camping-ground of Maniri was named, the party pursued the course of the Cconi through a more level tract of country. The stones and precipices became more rare, but in revenge the sandy banks soon began to reflect a heat that was hardly bearable.
The historiographer interrupted their conversation to ask if anything had yet been discovered. "Nothing yet," replied the examinador; "and this valley of the Cconi must be bewitched, for with the course that we have taken we should long ago have discovered what we are after. But this place looks more favorable than any we have met.
The first ford of the Cconi was passed just outside the town, at a point where the right bank of the river, growing steeper and steeper, became impracticable, and necessitated a crossing to the left. The ford allowed the peons to stagger through at mid-leg on the uneven pavement afforded by the large pebbles of the bed.
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."
A continuity of thunder, far off at first, but approaching nearer and nearer, kept up a constant and increasing fusillade, to whose reports was soon added the voice of the Cconi, lashed in its bed and bellowing like the sea. The surprising tumult went on in a crescendo. The hardly-interrupted charges of the lightning gave to the eye a strange vision of flying woods and soaring branches.
This affluent of the Cconi, flowing in from the south-south-west, was very sluggish as far as it could be seen. Its banks, interrupted by large rocks clothed with moss, offered now and then promontories surrounded at the base with a bluish shade. At the end of the vista, a not very extensive one, a quantity of blocks of sandstone piled together resembled a crumbling wall.
The estimate made by Eusebio, however, of the trend or direction of the calisaya groves, induced him to forsake the bed of the Cconi, and strike south-eastwardly, so as to cross the Ollachea and the Ayapata. "But the mountains are disappearing," hazarded Mr. Marcoy. "Will not the cinchonas disappear with them?"
At this point the valley of the Cconi was seen stretching indefinitely outward toward the east, enclosed in two chains of conical peaks: their regular forms, running into each other at the middle of their height, clothed with interminable forests and bathed with light, melted regularly away into the perspective.
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. The Bolivians imagined an exploration of a little stream on the left bank, the Chuntapunco, which they thought might issue from a quinine-bearing region.
At seven or eight miles' distance another streamlet was reached, named the Mamabamba. It is a slender affluent of the Cconi, to be called a rivulet in any country but South America, but here named a river with the same proud effrontery which designates as a city any collection of a dozen huts thrown into the ravine of a mountain.
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