The great water-wheel was trundling as fast as ever the white impulse from the old stone aqueduct could kick it along. The wheel, indeed, grumbled at so much hard work; but the water only laughed and danced as the big iron jaws of the trapiche[24] chewed up the yellow culms of sugar cane and spat to one side the useless pith, while the sweet, dark sap crept sluggishly down the iron conduit toward the sugar-house. In front was a very mountain of cane brought from the fields by bullock carts; and half a dozen sinewy negroes were feeding it, an armful at a time, between the rolls of the mill. Behind it others with wooden forks were spreading the crushed cane to dry for a day, after which it would be used as fuel to boil its own plundered juice. Off beyond the sugar building gleamed the white Moorish walls of the tile-roofed chapel and manor house, built three hundred years ago, when Peru was the richest crown jewel[100] of Spain. Everywhere else stretched the great fields of cane—to the very foot of the sandhills of the encroaching desert, to the very rim of the blue Pacific. What an immensity of sugar it all meant!