trail wide and smooth enough to run on they ran there was no stopping them until the trail became bad again and then stopped of themselves for days they had performed the hardest kind of work and fed most of the time on grass by themselves at night while we slept and yet that day they covered twenty eight leg breaking miles and the house of the sun into like a bunch of also there were several of them reared in the dry region on the side of that had never worn shoes in all their lives day after day and all day long they had travelled over the sharp with the extra weight of a man on their backs and their hoofs were in better condition than those of the shod horses the scenery between s where the gap into the sea and which we covered i our way led past a pit in half a day is well worth a week or a month but wildly beautiful as it is it becomes pale and small in comparison with the that lies beyond the rubber between and the two days were required to cover this marvellous stretch which lies on the side of the people who dwell there call it the ditch country an name but it has no other nobody else ever comes there nobody else knows anything about it with the exception of a handful of men whom business has brought there nobody has heard of the ditch country of now a ditch is a ditch muddy and usually the of the ing uninteresting and monotonous but the ditch is not an ordinary ditch the side of is by a thousand down which rush as many torrents each torrent of which a score of and before it reaches the sea more rain down here than in any other region in the world in the year s was four hundred and t vent inches water means sugar and sugar is the of the territory of wherefore the ditch which is not a ditch but a chain of the water travels appearing only at intervals to leap a travelling high in the air on a giddy and plunging into and through the opposing mountain this magnificent is called a ditch and with equal can s be called a box car there are no carriage roads through the ditch country and before the ditch was built or bored rather there was no horse trail hundreds of inches of rain on fertile soil under a sun means a steaming of vegetation a man on foot cutting his way through might advance a mile a day but at the end of a week he would be a wreck and he would have to crawl hastily back it he wanted to get out before the vegetation the passage way he had cut o was the daring engineer who conquered the and the ran the ditch and made the horse trail he built in and and made one of the most remarkable water farms in the world every little and is and conveyed by channels to the main ditch but so heavily it the house of the sun rain at times that countless let the escape to the sea the horse trail is not very wide like the engineer who built it it dares anything where the ditch through the mountain it over and where the ditch leaps a on a the horse l oi cloud is a i while beyond the gap it is a trail takes advantage of the ditch and crosses on top of the that careless trail thinks nothing of travelling up or down the faces of it its narrow way out of the wall around or passing under them where they thunder down in white fury while straight overhead the wall rises hundreds of feet and straight beneath it sinks a thousand and those marvellous mountain horses are as the trail they fox trot along it as a matter of course though the footing is slippery with thk ok the rain and they will gallop with their hind feet slipping over the edge if you let them i advise only those with steady nerves and cool heads to tackle the ditch trail one of our cow boys was noted as the strongest and on the big he had ridden mountain horses all his life on the rugged western slopes of he was first in the horse breaking and when the others hung back as a matter of course he would go in to meet a wild bull in the cattle pen he had a reputation but he had never ridden over the ditch it was there he lost his reputation when he faced the first a hair raising narrow without with a above another below and directly beneath a wild the air filled with driving spray and rocking to the and rush of sound and motion � well that cow boy dismounted from his horse explained briefly that he had a wife and two children and crossed over on foot leading the horse behind him the only relief from the was the and the only relief from the was the except where the ditch was far under ground in which case we crossed one horse and rider at a time on primitive log bridges that swayed and and threatened to carry away i confess that at first i rode such places with my feet loose in the and that on the sheer walls i saw to it by a definite conscious act of will that the foot in the outside overhanging the thousand feet of fall was exceedingly loose i say at first for as in the itself we quickly lost our conception of magnitude so on the ditch wc quickly lost our apprehension of depth the ceaseless of height and depth produced a state the house of the sun of consciousness in which height and depth were accepted 