Then came the
stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for
seventeen days, and the water was boiling at Yaguachi and all the
fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil; everywhere along the
Pacific slopes there were land-slips and swift thawings and sudden
floods, and one whole side of the old Arauca crest slipped and came
down in thunder, and cut off the Country of the Blind for ever from
the exploring feet of men. But one of these early settlers had
chanced to be on the hither side of the gorges when the world had
so terribly shaken itself, and he perforce had to forget his wife
and his child and all the friends and possessions he had left up
there, and start life over again in the lower world. He started it
again but ill, blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment in
the mines; but the story he told begot a legend that lingers along
the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.
He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness,
into which he had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a
vast bale of gear, when he was a child. The valley, he said, had
in it all that the heart of man could desire--sweet water, pasture,
an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub
that bore an excellent fruit, and on one side great hanging forests
of pine that held the avalanches high.
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