Peru labours under very considerable disadvantages, with regard to inland communication.

The elevated plateaux and table-lands, separated by deeply-embosomed valleys, and the gigantic mountains that intervene between the coast and the table-land, render travelling tedious and difficult. Roads and bridges, in many parts, are entirely wanting; and in places where rude and scarcely-distinguishable paths are found, they lie along the perilous edges of overhanging and rugged precipices, perpendicularly steep; and these tracks, moreover, are almost always so dangerously narrow, that the sure-footed mule can alone tread them with any security.

Those travellers who can afford it are usually carried on the backs of Indians : they are borne along in this way often for a fortnight or three weeks together, over paths that lead zig-zagging along, among rocks and steeps to all appearance inaccessible, and through uninhabited wildernesses and unbroken forests.

The means of necessary internal communication, however, are more carefully attended to, in regions that lie lower; and I am informed that the Government are giving their attention–please Revolutionists and Pronunciados–to a general system of road-making. Perhaps, in time–as engineering difficulties are despised and defied in these days, and as the first railroad has already been commenced under Government auspices in the country–the Peruvians will connect their chief cities by means of railroads, and join in the mighty march of the royal progress of nations.