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Lost in the Andes! is a Donald Duck story written by Carl Barks in April 1949. Donald and his nephews go to South America to find the mythical chickens that lay "square eggs" (actually, they are cubic eggs).
The story features Donald and his nephews as members of a museum sponsored expedition searching for the source of a number of square "artifacts" held in the Duckburg museum, recently revealed to be square eggs when Donald drops one and it cracks open. There is a rising interest, both scientific and financial, to find the source of these eggs and the chicken that gave birth to them. The only thing known about them though is that they came from somewhere in the Andes.
During the journey to South America, the nephews use the square eggs to make an omelette. This causes the members of the expedition to come down with food poisoning. By the time their boat reaches Peru, the only ones that have recovered enough to continue the expedition are the youngest in the group and the lowest in hierarchy: Donald and his nephews.
Their search for the square eggs in the Andes seems hopeless as the local population sees them either as insane or as suckers to be fooled into buying artificial eggs. Finally they meet a very old man who tells them of how his father once came into possession of square stones similar to their own. The father had found them on the body of an American explorer who had emerged from a neighboring valley which is covered in perpetual mist. The explorer, who had wandered the valley to the point of exhaustion, died soon afterwards. The old man's father later sold some of the "stones" in a local village and these ended up as the square eggs in the museum.
The Ducks follow the dead man's path into the mists and after days of effort they find a populated valley in the Mountains, hidden by the mists. The inhabitants are entirely cubibal with square heads and noses. They speak with an old Southern American accent taught to them by their previous visitor, the dead man, Professor Rhutt Betlah (probably a play on Rhett Butler) from Birmingham, Alabama, who had discovered their valley during the late 19th century.
During their stay in the valley, which the professor has named "Plain Awful", Huey, Dewey and Louie produce some bubble gum balloons, which is against the law in Plain Awful. It's forbidden to produce any round objects in the valley. The only way to get out of the valley and avoid punishment, is for HD&L to produce square balloons. They manage to do that by teaching the square chickens to chew gum and blow balloons, and then hiding them under their shirts and pretending they make the balloons themselves.
The Ducks convince the very hospitable locals to let them go. The latter are sad to see them go cause they were a source of information from the outside world to their small and isolated civilisation. They give the Ducks the compass that the professor had left in Plain Awful (and which was placed in a museum as a piece of art) and in turn, they teach them square dancing. When they leave the valley, in one of Barks' scarce moralizing moments, Donald remarks that the people in Plain Awful "had so little of anything, yet they were the happiest people we've ever known."
Bringing two square chickens and eggs with them the Ducks again struggle to escape from the mists. Finally, when they do manage it, they are nearly exhausted. The two chickens are still alive, but they had to eat the eggs. It is only when they return to Duckburg that they realise the entire expedition was a failure: both of the chickens are male and naturally can't reproduce. The story ends with Donald now giving an angry response to whoever mentions eggs and chicken to his face.
[wikipedia]
Language: English
