The miners, also, taking a crowbar with
them, often wander on Sundays over the mountains. In this south
part of Chile the men who drive cattle into the Cordillera, and who
frequent every ravine where there is a little pasture, are the
usual discoverers.
MARCH 20, 1835.
As we ascended the valley, the vegetation, with the exception of a
few pretty alpine flowers, became exceedingly scanty; and of
quadrupeds, birds, or insects, scarcely one could be seen. The
lofty mountains, their summits marked with a few patches of snow,
stood well separated from each other; the valleys being filled up
with an immense thickness of stratified alluvium. The features in
the scenery of the Andes which struck me most, as contrasted with
the other mountain chains with which I am acquainted, were,--the
flat fringes sometimes expanding into narrow plains on each side of
the valleys,--the bright colours, chiefly red and purple, of the
utterly bare and precipitous hills of porphyry, the grand and
continuous wall-like dikes,--the plainly-divided strata which,
where nearly vertical, formed the picturesque and wild central
pinnacles, but where less inclined, composed the great massive
mountains on the outskirts of the range,--and lastly, the smooth
conical piles of fine and brightly coloured detritus, which sloped
up at a high angle from the base of the mountains, sometimes to a
height of more than 2000 feet.
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