Cordilleras

“ On the great plateau the sun shines rather later than in the lower regions. As the luminary approached the earth, the sky was lighted up with a purple color, and I saw standing out on our left in bold relief the jagged outline of the Cordilleras of l'Encuerado's country. ”

“ At length the earth, convulsed by mighty throes in the far-away west from north to south, began to cast up a long line of rocky heights, now to sink, now to rise once more above the surface,—till by degrees Pelion piled on Ossa—the vast chain of the Cordilleras rose towards the skies, forming a mighty barrier between the two great oceans. ”

“ Far in the west rose upwards in the intense blue sky the snow-capped peaks of the Cordilleras, or Andes, of South America, with range beyond range of lofty mountains intervening, the more distant rugged and barren, the nearer clothed to their summits with trees, glittering cascades leaping down their side? from rock to rock; while here and there could be seen the openings of deep glens, at the bottom of which copious streams came rushing forth, forming the headwaters of the mighty Orinoco. ”

“ From our door we could see, on our right, beautiful hills undulating like the ground-swell of the sea; on the left, the Cordilleras, looking down with an air of great complaisance upon the plain beneath. Nature is renewing the fields far as the eye can reach; while in the foreground are the time-defying monuments of other days, garlanded with luxuriant shrubs and flowers, to sustain 176which they had been compelled to give up their own symmetry and beauty. ”

“ A march of a couple of days brought the pioneers to a lofty ridge, from which they had their first view of the Rocky Mountains—that grand continuation of the Cordilleras of Mexico, which forms a kind of backbone to North America, and is the common ancestral home of the rivers of the far West, and of many of those whose last resting-places are in the extreme North or the Gulf of Mexico. ”

“ The Alps, the Atlas, the Andes and the Cordilleras reach into the skies, but they encumber the earth with their vast proportions, and render the surface sterile. They take away from the area of tillable soil, and add it to waste and unprofitable districts. ”

“ How often did we not wish, during this memorable trip, that we could command the brush of a Turner or a Poussin or a Claude Lorrain, in order to bring home with us copies of some of those wonderful pictures that Nature exhibited to our admiring gaze in her great art gallery of the Oriental Cordilleras!
The higher we ascended above the lowlands the less dense became the forests and the less luxuriant the vegetation. At times there were extended reaches of land that were quite treeless ”

“ About [pg 285] fifteen leagues from the coast, and parallel with it, a chain of higher mountains rises to a height of between 7000 and 8000 feet. From the summit of these—and it is no easy task to climb so far—one is enabled to form a slight idea of the desert of Atacama. To the east, you see the majestic Cordilleras, their bright peaks glittering in the distance through a golden mist; while on the north, south, and west, there is an unrelieved expanse without sign of life or hope, but everywhere silence: and what a silence! ”

“ Our observations at the top of Conchagua had signally confirmed them.
We could distinctly make out the existence of a great valley extending due north, and our glasses revealed a marked depression in the Cordilleras, which in all the maps were represented as maintaining here the character of a high, unbroken range. Of course no such valley as opened before us could exist without a considerable stream flowing through it. ”

“ The higher summits of the Cordilleras afford a larger and more continuous supply of water, and so dependent are the people in the cultivated river valleys on this source of water supply that they watch for snowstorms in the Cordilleras as an indication of what the coming season is to be. ”

“ The grand mountain range of the Andes, or Cordilleras, with its rugged and barren peaks and volcanoes, and destitution of human habitants, sometimes for scores of miles in the traveller’s route, has afforded a striking theme for many writers of their own adventures in South America. Mr. Temple, a traveller in 1825, affords us some exciting views of the perils of his journey from Peru to Buenos Ayres. ”

“ The one strong segregating feature in primitive America was the Cordilleras, which held east and west apart. In the natural pockets formed by the high intermontane valleys of the Andes and the Anahuac Plateau, and in the constricted isthmian region, the continent afforded a few secluded localities where civilization found favorable conditions of development. ”

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11 Crossing a mountain range like the Oriental Cordilleras, is not, as is so frequently imagined, a gradual and uninterrupted ascent to the summit, and then a similar continuous descent to its base. Far from it. It is literally an ever-recurring journey “up the hill and down the dale,” from the foothills on one side of the range to the foothills on the other. The accompanying diagram from Karsten’s Géologie de l’Ancienne Colombie Bolivarienne, gives a good idea of the eastern range of the Andes along our route from the Meta to the Magdalena. ”

“ Although these Cordilleras of North America afford access by their dislocations to a great supply of mineral substances, they are on the whole a curse to the continent. By the cold and dryness which their height entails, they reduce one third of the continent to sterility. Though here and there in their valleys we find oases of fertile land, and many regions of limited area may be made fertile by the use of irrigation, at least nineteen-twentieths of their lands are irretrievably barren. ”

“ The various passages of the Cordilleras nowhere permit the vegetable productions of the warm regions to proceed from the coasts of the Pacific to the banks of the Amazon. When a peak attains a great elevation, either in the middle of very low mountains and plains, or in the centre of an archipelago heaved up by volcanic fires, its summit is covered with alpine plants, many of which are again found, at immense distances, on other mountains having an analogous climate. ”

“ Traveling from the foothills to the summit of the Cordilleras is like going from the equator to the arctic circle. One has every variety of climate peculiar to the torrid, [270] temperate and frigid zones, and the fauna and flora vary with the altitude as they change with the climate.
The inhabitants of the Andean regions have long recognized three distinct climates, known as those of the tierra caliente—hot land; the tierra fría—cold land; and the paramo. Men of science have, for the sake of convenience, added a third climate, that of the tierra templada, or temperate land. ”

“ It must be understood that many of the scenes I have to describe took place in this favoured region; while others, again, were among the mountains and valleys to the east of the vast range of the Andes. People when reading of mountains are so apt to picture to themselves the molehills of Europe, which can mostly be crossed on foot in a day or so, that I must remind them that the Cordilleras and Andes which I am describing are an extensive region, the passage over which requires not only days, but in some places even weeks to accomplish. ”

“ In the lower slopes of the Cordilleras, the heat is greater than on the tablelands, which have a temperate climate; while on the lofty, snow-clad summits of the range, the cold is as intense as in the arctic regions. ”

“ Truly are these pigmy savages an odd people!
111 THE AMAZONIAN INDIANS. In glancing at the map of the American continent, we are struck by a remarkable analogy between the geographical features of its two great divisions—the North and the South,—an analogy amounting almost to a symmetrical parallelism.
Each has its “mighty” mountains—the Cordilleras of the Andes in the south, and the Cordilleras of the Sierra Madre (Rocky Mountains) in the north—with all the varieties of volcano and eternal snow. Each has its secondary chain: in the north, the Nevadas of California and Oregon ”

“ 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. ”

“ A more gorgeous panorama cannot well be imagined. The belts of bright-colored vegetation, marked by the valleys with their winding rivers and streams, were backed with masses of the Cordillera with their varied tints and snow-capped peaks. On the other hand, the dark-hued vegetation of the virgin forests of the Pacific slopes stretched down to the ocean’s margin, which with its thousand bays and inlets and fringe of foam which was quite visible, looked like an edging of lace. ”

“ We are on the montaña of the eastern Cordillera, a mountain land of amazing fertility, well wooded, yet not so thickly as to render progress difficult; the wayside is bordered with brilliant flowers, cascades tumble from rocky heights, and far away to the west rise in the clear air the glorious Andes, alps on alps, a vast range of stately snow-crowned peaks, endless and solemn, veiled yet not hidden by fleecy clouds, and as cold and mysterious as winter stars looking down on a sleeping world. ”

“ Behold, then, a sterile coastline, beaten by never-ending surf, broken by rocky promontories, bird-covered perhaps, and seal-haunted, whence the distant roar of breaking rollers at times comes seaward, and, inland, a rising, undulating zone of desert and cañon, brown or tawny or purple in its shadows, stretching away mysteriously for perhaps a hundred miles to where it meets the solemn Cordillera, which, grey, faint and serrated, with no form save that of outline—the true test of distance—forms our horizon on the east. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here, plunging furiously down the steep, precipitous descents of the Cordillera Oriental, between the high, heavily wooded mountains, which rise almost perpendicularly to the clouds, it dashes itself into spray against the immense boulders that form its bed, and throws itself over the numerous precipices in its path with a deep, resounding roar like distant thunder. ”

“ In this part of the valley, the mountains on each side were from 3000 to 6000 or 8000 feet high, with rounded outlines and steep bare flanks. The general colour of the rock was dullish purple, and the stratification very distinct. If the scenery was not beautiful, it was remarkable and grand. We met during the day several herds of cattle, which men were driving down from the higher valleys in the 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. ”