'The first occasion was a ride in the barren wastes that lie beyond the reach of irrigation all round Lima. These expeditions are called hunting, and on feast-days the more athletic citizens urge their horses about the stony deserts in search of a more or less fabulous creature said to resemble a hare and blaze away at the very few things that move, usually a dingy, inedible passerine which I take to be a dwarvish subspecies of Sturnus horridus. I collected three beetles for you, of which all I can say is that they belong to the pentamera and that I am astonished that even such meagre, attenuated creatures could scrape a living from the desolation we travelled over. The General was more fortunate. He brought down a singularly beautiful tern, the Sterna ynca of Suarez: I can only suppose that it was taking a direct path from a curve in the river to some better fishing-ground along the coast; but the event was so rare, so nearly unknown, that it gave the General the utmost satisfaction - he declared there could be no finer omen for our future conversations.
'A good omen is always welcome: yet if it were not presumptuous I should feel inclined to say that there is comparatively little doubt about the outcome of these conversations, three of the high ecclesiastics and four governors being already wholly committed to us, together with those for whom they speak; while the officers in command of the regiments that must be moved are tolerably venal men, and we have ample funds at hand. Yet at the same time certain forms must still be observed: there must be persuasion, a gentle violence, before they can decently fall.
'We are to have a preliminary meeting without these gentlemen on Wednesday to arrange the details of payment and to decide whether Castro should be invited to the main conference on Friday. He is being very discreetly sounded at this moment, in the palace itself: the empty palace, for the Viceroy is hurrying to quell a disturbance in far northern Peru. He left with his military household and some other troops soon after I had met the last of our friends here who were still in Lima and he is already ten days' journey along the road.
'I could not have come at a more fortunate moment, when the Viceroy had alienated so many of the Creoles and so much of the army; when the desire for independence had risen to such a height; when he was about to remove himself and his surest friends from the capital; and when the ground had been to a certain extent prepared. It would perhaps have been wiser to start with Chile, where Bernardo O'Higgins (close kin to our Vicar- General) has so considerable a following; but given the present aspect of affairs, to say nothing of my direct, explicit instructions, I believe we may do very well here. It is true that time is all-important, with that smooth coordination of troop-movements, declarations, and the summoning of a Peruvian council that will present the Viceroy with a fait accompli on his return, a very well established fait accompli, with all these movements carried out and an overwhelming force in the citadel; yet most fortunately General Hurtado has an unusual sense of the passing hour, and he is a most capable chief of staff, the most capable in the Spanish service.
'How I wish I could give you the results of the full conference or even of the preliminary meeting, but I am to ride into the mountains directly, and the messengers who carry this to the Atlantic coast will be gone before I can be back. May I beg you to send the enclosed half-sheet down to Hampshire?'
'My dear,' he wrote on the half-sheet in question, 'this is the merest hasty scribble to bring you both my fondest love from our most recent port of call, and to tell you that all is well with us, except for poor Martin, who has been obliged to be sent home for his health. With the blessing, this note will reach you some three months before he arrives: please tell his wife that I am confident she will see him quite restored.
'This is a pleasant climate, for gentle sea-breezes temper the heat; but they assure me it never rains at all, not at all, ever; and although there are damp fogs throughout the winter they are not enough to relieve the almost total sterility of the desert, stony or sandy, that lies along the coast, the virtual absence of life, animal or vegetable. Yet I have already achieved one of my greatest ambitions: I have seen the condor. And you will be pleased to learn that I have already collected seven distinct species of mouse (five inhabit the fringe of the desert, one its very heart, and the seventh was making a nest in my papers), while the rivers, of course, which are fed from the high far-off snows and which therefore flow their strongest in the summer, provide their valleys and their irrigated fields with a valuable flora and fauna. But it is the high mountain that I long to see, with its plants and creatures unlike any others in the world; at this moment I am booted and spurred for a journey to the moderate heights. My mule stands in a courtyard close at hand, and across his saddle-bow he bears a poncho, an oblong piece of cloth with a hole in the middle, through which I shall put my head when I reach five or six thousand feet.
'Now God bless you, my dearest love; and pray kiss Brigit for me.
He sat back, reflecting with the utmost tenderness upon his wife Diana, that fierce, spirited young woman, and upon their daughter, whom he had not seen but whom he pictured as a very small child in a pinafore, walking by now, perhaps already conversable. Once again his watch broke in upon his wandering thoughts: a watch that would have been a more valuable guide if he had wound it the night before. He folded his papers, carried them into Gayongos' private room, and rehearsed his direction once more. 'You cannot miss it,' said Gayongos, 'but I wish you may get there before nightfall. You are starting more than three hours late.' Stephen bent his head; he could not but admit it. 'And there is a cruel wind blowing right in your face,' added Gayongos. He led Stephen through a daedal of passages and stables to a courtyard where the mule was standing, a tall, intelligent animal that recognized their destination after their first two or three turns through Lima streets, making his way through the gate beyond the Misericordia convent without guidance and striking into the road that ran a little north of east towards the mountains along the left of the river, a fine turbulent great stream, growing day by day as the season advanced. The road was not much frequented at present, though on Friday and Saturday it would be full of people going up to the shrine of Our Lady of Huenca; and it grew less beyond the limits of irrigated land. The mule was an ambler with a long easy motion and Stephen sat quite relaxed upon his back: the river-banks had a reasonable population of birds, while the occasional reptile crossed the road and large flying beetles were common as long as the carob-groves lasted. Part of Stephen's mind recorded them, but the strong east wind and the dust made it hard to see with any sharp definition and in any case the rest of his being was so taken up with the possibility, indeed the strong probability, of a brilliant success for his mission within the next eight days or even less that he never stopped or reached for his pocket-glass. The whole scheme had matured so quickly, because of his excellent relations with Hurtado and O'Higgins and above all because of the Viceroy's departure, that his spirits, usually so well under control, were now in something of a fluster. This was a condition he had seen often enough in his colleagues, but finding it in himself put him somewhat out of countenance.
Once more he went over the various moves, the replacing of stated regiments by others, the convocation of wholly committed supporters, the summoning of a council, the issue of a proclamation, the rapid dispatch of guns to command three essential bridges: as he named them in order they seemed simple enough, and his heart beat so that he could hear it. Yet he had some acquaintance with the military mind, the Spanish military mind, and with that of the Spanish conspirator; and before now he had seen a series of actions that were simple in themselves, but that had of necessity to be carried out in sequence, fall into hopeless chaos for want of a sense of time, for want of common efficiency, or because of hidden jealousies.
He wished he had not used such confident, presumptuous words in writing to Blaine. From very early times men had believed that it was unwise, even impious, to tempt fate: the ancient generations were not to be despised. The confident system of his youth - universal reform, universal changes, universal happiness and freedom - had ended in something very like universal tyranny and oppression. The ancient generations were not to be despised; and the seamen's firm belief that Friday was unlucky was perhaps less foolish than the philosophe's conviction that all the days of the week could be rendered happy by the application of an enlightened system of laws. He wished the main conference had not been set for Friday.
Blushing at his momentary weakness, he turned his mind to Hurtado. The General might have some small
