before this time. A detachment of about 150 men under a Spanish captain, named Saavedra (he who afterward discovered and named Valparaiso) next followed. Almagro himself tarried in Cuzco a while, attending to the collecting of recruits, but, suspecting that Pizarro was again trying to circumvent him, he set forth before his levies were completed, leaving orders that the remainder of his forces should follow him as soon as they could be brought together.
So at the end of the year 1535, Almagro, with sanguine hopes of attaining immense booty—for reports of the immense wealth of Chile had been repeatedly received by the Spaniards in Peru—set out over the mountains upon one of the Inca's great military roads with an army of 570 Spaniards and about 15,000 Peruvians commanded by Paullu. Great stone-flagged military roads radiated from Cuzco into every part of the Incarial empire. Two of these roads led to Chile; one followed the trend of the seacoast across the desert of Atacama, where for three hundred miles there is neither shrub nor water nor living thing; the other passed over the snow-capped Andes for a distance of over one hundred miles. The latter road was the one selected by Almagro, perhaps because it was the shorter route, or it may be because his Indian allies warned him against encountering the dangers of the great Atacama desert. The desert, however, could not have caused them worse fatigues and hardships than they encountered in crossing the mountains. On account of the intense cold and the frequent skirmishes with savages, 150 Spaniards and 10,000 Peruvians perished amid the gloomy forests of pine, in the gorges of snow, and upon the barren table- lands — the desolate despoblados where shrubs never grew. It was just at the beginning of winter, when snow covers
