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Updated: June 25, 2025
It was a prim and niggling little water-colour drawing of English Redford a flat facade, with swallows as big as condors flying over the roofs, and dogs that could never have got through any doorway gambolling on the lawn in front. A tiny 'Mary Carey' in one corner was just, and only just, visible to the naked eye.
His naked head and neck is reddish; but he wants the crest or comb, which the condors and king-vultures have. On the posterior part of his neck, long lance-shaped feathers form a sort of ruff or collar, as in other birds of this kind.
Not an atom of green was to be seen anywhere. Apparently we stood on top of a dead world. Mountain climbers in the Andes have frequently spoken of seeing condors at great altitudes. We saw none. Northwest, twenty miles away across the Pampa Colorada, a reddish desert, rose snow-capped Solimana.
The vaquero, however, had a good many "dodges," and after the ruse he had just practised upon the vicuñas, Leon suspected he would employ some similar artifice with the condors. Leon was right. It was by a stratagem the bird was to be taken. The vaquero laid hold of a long rope, and lifting the bull's hide upon his shoulders, asked Guapo to follow him with the two horses.
Others, who in their delirium had drank its brine, died in more agony, and lay in strings along the side washed by the waves. At the approach of a human being, flocks of hideous galanasas and great droves of condors would rise lazily, too heavy from their ghastly feast, to flap their monstrous wings. It was a sight to sicken one forever of the vaunted glories of the battlefield.
As for the horses, their carcasses were not suffered long to cumber the ground, as they were quickly seized and devoured half raw by the starving soldiers, who, like the famished condors, now hovering in troops above their heads, greedily banqueted on the most offensive offal to satisfy the gnawings of hunger.
Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah. On several patches of the snow I found the Protococcus nivalis, or red snow, so well known from the accounts of Arctic navigators.
All this will account for the shyness of this great bird, while other vultures are usually so tame that you may approach within a few paces of them. As yet the half-dozen condors hovering about kept well off from the hut; and Leon could not understand how any one of them was to be caught.
"They do not build nests," replied Lucien, "they choose a cavity in the rocks, or in the soil around them, where they lay two large white oval eggs, and hatch them just as other vultures do. Strange to say, very little is known of their mode of life in their elevated haunts; but this is because the natives of the Sierras rarely venture up to the high regions where the condors dwell.
With respect to their propagation, I was told by the country people in Chile, that the condor makes no sort of nest, but in the months of November and December lays two large white eggs on a shelf of bare rock. It is said that the young condors cannot fly for an entire year; and long after they are able, they continue to roost by night, and hunt by day with their parents.
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