Page:Gaston Leroux--The bride of the sun.djvu/260

246 Dick, wild with impatience, would have liked to club the engine driver and take charge of the locomotive himself, but Orellana calmed him down.

"We're sure to get there before them. You'll see! Why, we shall even have time to do some fishing!"

Leaving their fellow-travelers to cut up the vicuña, they returned to their carriage, where the stove had been lighted. It had become intensely cold, for they were now in the snow regions, more than fourteen thousand feet above sea-level. Soroche, or mountain fever, threw the young engineer, and after bleeding violently at the nose, he fell into a semi-comatose condition. He did not recover until Punho, when he again remembered the horrible nightmare through which he was living, and savagely demanded to be shown the way to the Temple of Death.

"We're going there," replied his strange guide, but first took him to the main square, where about a hundred Indian girls, wearing skirts of a dark material and the low-cut bodices of their race, squatted in orderly rows, selling fruits and vegetables dried in the cold.

"There are usually two hundred of them," explained Orellana, "but the Red Ponchos have been this way and chosen the best-looking half