Cordillera

“ In the distance rises the great Cordillera stretching towards the Brazils; whilst the nearer peaks of the Andes, whitened with snow, shine round about us, cold, rugged, and silent, in vast masses that cause our hearts to dilate with a half painful sense of the sublime. The clear blue sky of the plains has deepened almost into black; the dull, lead-colored sun seems to have lost the power of communicating heat, and looks like a mere spectre of the tyrant under whose reign for so many years, men, women, and children have been flayed, or roasted, or marked with a brand upon the skin. ”

“ The name of the Andes, to the traveller who has crossed the giddy passes and scaled the high peaks of this stupendous mountain chain, brings back sensations which are a blend of the pleasurable and the painful. In his retrospect the Cordillera—for such is its familiar name to the inhabitants of the land it traverses—bulks as a thing of varied and almost indescribable moods. It possesses that individuality—menacing, beautiful by turns—which no doubt is an attribute of all mountains, in the recollection of those who best know them. ”

“ At a distance we could at times see the summit of some mountains belonging to the principal chain of the Cordillera, covered with snow, and we appeared as if completely isolated—the bed of clouds behind us looked like the sea, limited only by the horizon, and before us the mountains reared their towering heads, as if to oppose our progress. ”

“ It had shifted them upon the whole extent of the immense Campo, with the white walls of its haciendas on the knolls dominating the green distances; with its grass-hatched ranchos crouching in the folds of ground by the banks of streams; with the dark islands of clustered trees on a clear sea of grass, and the precipitous range of the Cordillera, immense and motionless, emerging from the billows of the lower forests like the barren coast of a land of giants. ”

“ The eastern branch of the Cordillera of the Andes, which, running between the Huallaga and the Mayro, unites this peninsula with Peru, and the different mountains which, originating at the Cordillera, descend at various distances into the plain, abound in that rich metal which ennobles man, which constitutes his fortune, and which even acquires him, without effort, the sublime titles of wise, discreet, and the rest of those eminent qualities that are wont to shine with diminished lustre when viewed from beneath the humble garments of the poor. ”

“ We longed to see that massive chain that extends in unbroken continuity from Panama to Patagonia. And day by day, as we moved westward, our wistful eyes were ever peering through broken forest or over [191] grass-covered glade, to catch the first view of La Cordillera de los Andes.
While silently sitting on the prow of our launch admiring the countless, ever-changing beauties of that marvelous moonlight night—our last on the Meta,—giving free rein to our fancy, and shifting our course as the meandering river demanded, behold! ”

“ The oasis, as I now for the first time discovered, was a valley, a broad shallow depression in the desert falling in a gentle slope from the foot of the Cordillera to the sea, whereby its irrigation was greatly facilitated.
“How beautiful Quipai looks, and how like a river!” said Angela. “That is what I always think when I come here—how like a river!”
“Who knows that long ago the valley was not the bed of a river!”
“It must be very long ago, then, before there was any Cordillera. Rain-clouds never cross the Andes, and for untold ages there can have been no rain here on the coast.” ”

“ From the western coastal hill area the mountains rise abruptly in parallel ranges lying in a general north and south direction, and they subside only in the foothills west of the great level bottom land bordering the Rio Grande de Cagayan. The Cordillera Central is as fair and about as varied a mountain country as the tropic sun shines on. It has mountains up which one may climb from tropic forest jungles into open, pine-forested parks, and up again into the dense tropic forest, with its drapery of vines, its varied hanging orchids, and its graceful, lilting fern trees. ”

“ Six highways sally forth from the city, to march waveringly across the plain, mere threads lost at last in the enclosing range, broken, gnarled, pitched and tumbled into every manner of shape, bright peaks and valleys standing sharply forth where the sun strikes, great purple-black patches marking the shadows of the clouds. Beyond all else, at times lost in clouds, at others plainly visible, lay the central range of the Cordillera over which we must pass on our journey southward. ”

“ At times one might have fancied one’s self on a great river in the interior of a continent, while a few minutes later, in the openings between the islands, the eye could range over miles of water to the mysterious recesses of the yet unexplored Cordillera of Patagonia, with occasional glimpses of snowy peaks at least twice the height of the summits near at hand. About two o’clock we reached the so-named English Narrows, where the only known navigable channel is scarcely a hundred yards in width between two islets bristling with rocks. ”

“ These mountains at 33° south latitude divide into two parallel ranges, one running southward along the borders of the Pacific Ocean, the other forming the grand Cordillera upon which San Martin gazed from Mendoza. The coast range is a succession of granite hills with rounded summits and gentle slopes, like to the waves of a petrified sea. The great Cordillera is in its centre composed of three or four ranges of conical and sharply-defined peaks which rise one over the other to a height of 21,000 feet above the level of the sea, crowned with perpetual snow. ”

“ The plain is interrupted by widely separated valleys whose green lowland meadows form a brilliant contrast to the monotonous browns and yellows of the shimmering desert. In rare situations the valley trenches enable one to look far into the Cordillera and to catch memorable glimpses of lofty peaks capped with snow.
If the traveler come to the west-coast landscape from the well-molded English hills or the subdued mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire with their artistic blending of moderate profiles, he will at first see nothing but disorder. ”

“ Our intention had been to strike the Indian trail under the Cordillera and follow it until we reached the neighbourhood of the River Belgrano, when we would keep the course of that river to its junction with the River Chico, which in its turn would lead us down to the settlement of Santa Cruz, our destination. When I left the Cordillera I had made up my mind to return to them farther south at the Lake Argentino near lat. 50°. To cover a large area of country, and at the same time to collect specimens, is a physical impossibility. ”

“ Nothing can be more bleak and dreary than the appearance of the whole Cordillera of Catorce: a few narrow mule-paths, or the white bed of a torrent indistinctly traced upon the surface, alone break the monotonous colouring of the mass; and the town, though placed at an immense height, is invisible from below, being completely hidden by the brow of the mountain: not a tree, not a blade of grass is to be seen in its vicinity ”

“ Beyond the mountain knot of Los Pastos two Cordilleras run in a north-easterly direction to about 2 N. The western Cordillera is broken by the valley of the Patia, which has its source on the slopes of the valley between the mountain knot of Los Pastos and the transverse ridge south of Popayan. The eastern Cordillera is continued into the Paramo de Guanacas, from which basis the Andes spread out fan-like into three Cordilleras. This paramo, like the cross range between Iliniza and Cotopaxi, forms part of the main watershed between the rivers draining into the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. ”

“ Descending now from the clouds, metaphorically and actually, we must glance more particularly at the life of those modern countries which have in part their home in the Cordillera, to whom the Cordillera is a very real and palpable thing. ”

“ I observed some appearances on the plains at the eastern and opposite foot of the Cordillera which are worth notice, as showing that the sea there long acted at nearly the same level as on the basin-plains of Chile. The mountains on this eastern side are exceedingly abrupt; they rise out of a smooth, talus-like, very gentle, slope, from five to ten miles in width (as represented in Figure 13) , entirely composed of perfectly rounded pebbles, often white-washed with an aluminous substance like decomposed feldspar. ”

“ Disregarding local disturbances, the beds are either horizontal or inclined at a small angle eastwards: hence, when standing on the plain of Uspallata and looking to the west or backwards, the Cordillera appear composed of huge, square, nearly horizontal, tabular masses: so wide a space, with such lofty mountains so equably elevated, is rarely met with within the Cordillera. In this line of section, the interval between the Puente del Inca and the neighbourhood of the Cumbre, includes all the chief axes of dislocation. ”

“ Near the Cordillera the summit-plain on both sides of the valley is between 3,200 and 3,300 feet in height; at 100 miles from the Atlantic, it is 1,416 feet, and on the coast 840 feet, all above the sea-beach; so that in a distance of 100 miles the plain rises 576 feet, and much more rapidly near to the Cordillera. The lower terraces B and C also appear to rise as they run up the valley ”

“ Here three clearly defined ranges diverge from the Ecuadorian frontier and spread northward like the ribs of a fan; the Western and Central Cordilleras merge before reaching the Caribbean Sea, and slope off into foothills and plains near the coast, and the Eastern Cordillera continues in an almost unbroken line until, as the Sierra de Parija, it plunges into the sea at the end of the bleak, forbidding peninsula (Goajira) west of the Gulf of Maracaibo. ”

“ The Cordillera of the Andes, that immense spine of the American continent, the whole length of which it traverses under different names from north to south, forms, at various elevations, immense llanos, on which entire people live at a height at which all vegetation ceases in Europe. ”

“ The space between the Cordillera and the coast of Chile is on a rude average from eighty to above one hundred miles in width; it is formed, either of an almost continuous mass of mountains, or more commonly of several nearly parallel ranges, separated by plains; in the more southern parts of this province the mountains are quite subordinate to the plains; in the northern part the mountains predominate. ”

“ The Cordilleras of the Andes are strange mountains, with which no others in the world could be compared, and they form, so to speak, the backbone of the New World, the entire length of which they traverse. It is in Chili, whose natural frontier they form, that they assume the sternest and most gloomy proportions; raising to the clouds their snow-covered heads, it seems as if it were under the pressure of an omnipotent will, as Ervilla, the poet of Araucania, says, that they allow at certain periods daring travellers to enter their dark gorges and cross their denuded peaks. ”

“ The high world occupies the ground which separates the two above-mentioned chains of mountains, the summits of which are distant from each other, ten, twenty, and, in some instances, fifty leagues. It indeed happens that in some places they meet and unite, by the interposition of a third Cordillera, which runs east and west. Such is that of Asuay and Moxanda, in the kingdom of Quito [4] . Notwithstanding its soil, covered with verdure and foliage, is interrupted by innumerable heaths and deep clefts, still it is very aptly described by a philosopher who had occasion to examine this Cordillera. ”

“ It runs along under the Cordillera at a varying distance of about twenty or thirty miles from their bases. It was a sad remark that an Indian made to us while talking about the ancient wanderings of his people. "Once," he said, "we had the sea upon the one side of us, and upon the other the Cordillera. But this is not so now. The white man is ever advancing upon one side and the Cordillera remains ever unchanging upon the other. Soon there will be no place for us ”

“ Rolling plains extended to the north and north-east, whilst the Cordillera rose like a wall on the western side. This hill is called by the Indians ‘God’s Hill;’ and the tradition, as communicated by Casimiro, relates that from this spot the Great Spirit dispersed the animals which he had made in the caverns. But some of the animals must have remained behind, as, out on the lower slope of the downs, two pumas were chased and killed. An hour’s ride over a sandy plain brought us to a valley with a stream flowing through beautifully green pasture. ”

“ It has been practised for a long time on the Chilean slope of the Cordillera from the latitude of Coquimbo and San Juan to the north of Lake Quillen. At present it tends to disappear from the Andes of the Neuquen.75 But there is still transhumation on the Argentine side. The sheep of the plateau, driven from their winter pasture when the water dries up, ascend the Cordillera. Sometimes the mountains are not yet free from snow. In that case the journey is delayed, and the sheep feed on the way, to the great detriment of the land they cross. ”

“ The canyons, waterfalls, and geysers of the cordillera share their youth with the lakes, waterfalls, and rapids due to recent glaciation in the east. Nevertheless, though youth is the condition of most striking beauty, maturity and old age are the condition of greatest usefulness. The young cordillera with its mountains still in the making can support only a scanty population, whereas the old eastern mountains, with the lines of long life engraved upon every feature, open their arms to man and let him live and prosper. ”