South America Observations and Impressions

On our way back something went wrong with the machinery and the vessel had more than once to moor herself to the bank till things were set right. This gave opportunities for going ashore and exploring the banks. In some places the forest was too dense to penetrate without a machete to hew a way through the shrubs and climbers. In other places where one could creep under the trees or pull one's self up the cliffs by the boughs, the effort was rewarded by finding an endless variety of new flowers and ferns. The latter are in this damp atmosphere especially luxuriant; and their tall fronds, dipping into the river, were often seven or eight feet long. It was a primeval forest, wild as it had been from the beginning of things, for only in two or three places had dwellings been planted on level spots by the river and little clearings made; and the hills are so high and rocky that it may remain untouched and lonely for many a year to come.

The other excursion was towards the Andes. There is along the railway no prettier spot than Collilelfu, where a rapid river, broad and bright like the Scottish Tay, but with clearer and greener water, sweeps down out of the foothills into the meadows of the Central Valley. Here a French company have constructed a little branch railway, partly to bring down timber, partly in the hope of continuing their line far up the valley and across a pass into Argentina, in order to carry cattle to and fro. The manager, a courteous Frenchman from the Basque land of Bearn, ran us up this line through a succession of lovely views along the river to a point where we got horses and rode for seven or eight miles further through the forest up and down low ridges to the shore of Lake Rinihue. The forest was in parts too thick to penetrate without cutting one's way through creeping and climbing plants, but in others it was open enough to give mysterious vistas between the tall stems, and delicious effects where the sunlight fell upon a glade. The trees were largely evergreen, but few or none of them coniferous, for in Chile it is only at higher levels that the characteristic conifers, such as the well-known Araucaria, flourish. Here at last we found that characteristic South American arboreal flora we had been looking forward to, a forest where all that we saw was new, unlike the woods of western North America and of Europe, not only because the variety of the trees was far greater than it is there, but also because so many bore brilliant flowers upon their higher boughs, where the sunlight reached them. We were told that in midsummer the flowers would be still more profuse, but those we saw were abundant and beautiful enough, some white, some crimson or scarlet, some yellow, very few blue. One climber lit up the shade with its red blossoms, and below there were long rows, standing up along the path, wherever it was fairly open to the light, of white and pink foxgloves, a species closely resembling our own, while a woody ragwort, eight to ten feet high, bore a spreading umbel of yellow. The Calceolarias, frequent in Peru, do not seem to come so far south as this. Most of the trees had small leaves, but two, one called the lengue, valued for its bark, and another resembling a laurel, had large, dark green, glossy foliage. It was a silent wood, except for the paroquets and the occasional coo of a wood-pigeon; nor did we see any four-footed creatures, except two large, reddish brown foxes scurrying across the path ahead of us. Wildcats are scarce, and the puma, the beast of prey that has the widest range over the Western Hemisphere, is here hardly ever seen. The woodscape was less grand and solemn than what one sees in the great redwood forests of California or in the sombre depths of those that cover the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington, where the Douglas fir and the huge "cedar"60 tower so high over the trails that one can scarce catch the light through their topmost branches. Nor can I say that the views were more beautiful than may still be had in the few remaining ancient forests of England with their ancestral oaks and spreading beeches. But there was here a peculiar feature, giving a sense of the exuberant vitality of nature, in the profusion of parasitic plants clothing the trunks of the trees, both the fallen and the living, some of them flowering plants, but more of them ferns and mosses, especially tender little filmy ferns such as one finds on the moist and shady rocks of western Scotland and among the mountains of Killarney.

We embarked on Lake Rinihue in a tiny steamboat, and sailed some miles over its exquisitely clear, green waters. Steep hills from two to three thousand feet high enclose it, and at its upper end, where it winds in towards the central range of the Andes, small glaciers descend from between high snowpeaks. The view, looking across the deep green of the forests, broken here and there by a rocky cliff, up to these glittering pinnacles, had a beauty not only of color and form, but of mystery also, – that indefinable sense of mystery which belongs to little-known countries. In regions like Scotland or the Alps or Norway one has historical associations and the sense of a long human past to enhance the loveliness of hills and groves and streams. Here one has the compensating charm of an untouched and almost unexplored nature. The traveller in southern Chile feels as if he were a discoverer, so little visited is this land, and such a promise of wild beauty waiting to be revealed lies in the recesses of these mountains. Along the shores of Rinihue, which is twelve miles long, there is, save for a house or two at the place where we embarked, no trace of human life. Other such lakes, many of them much larger, lie scattered over a space some four hundred miles long and fifty miles wide on both the Argentine and the Chilean side of the Cordillera, a land of forests virtually unexplored and uninhabited, except by a few wandering Indians, standing now as it has stood ever since the Andes were raised. The day will come, perhaps less than a century hence, when the townsfolk of a then populous Argentina, weary of the flat monotony of their boundless Pampas, will find in this wilderness of lake and river and mountain such a place, wherein to find rest and recreation in the summer heats, as the North Americans of the Eastern states do in the Appalachian hills; and the North Americans of the West, in the glorious ranges along the Pacific coast. Superior to the former region in its possession of snow mountains, equal to the latter in climate and picturesque beauty, and to the naturalist more interesting than either from its still active volcanoes and its remarkable flora, this lake land of the southern Andes is an addition, the value of which the South Americans have hardly yet realized, to the scenic wealth of our planet.

CHAPTER VII

ACROSS THE ANDES

For more than two thousand miles the republics of Argentina and Chile are divided from one another by the gigantic barrier of the Andes. So great is the continuous elevation of the range, so little commercial intercourse can there be across it, so few are the points at which it can be crossed even on foot by any travellers who are not expert mountaineers, that the communications between those dwelling on opposite sides of the mountains have been at all times very scanty. The contrast between the two sides is marked. For eight hundred miles south of the Equator, the eastern slopes of the Andean chain have abundance of rain, while the central plateau is dry and the western declivity is a waterless desert. But in the region which lies south of the Tropic of Capricorn, outside the region of trade-winds, the exact reverse holds. In this southern section of the Andes it is the eastern side that is dry and the western side that is wet, because westerly winds prevail and bring up from the Pacific rain clouds that scatter their moisture on the heights they first meet and have none left to bestow on the Argentine side of the Cordillera. This great dividing range, checking intercourse between the peoples on its two flanks, is the dominant fact in the political and economic life as well as in the physical geography of the southern part of the continent. It has given these two neighbour peoples, Chileans and Argentines, different habits, different characters, and a different history.

The infrequency of communication across the mountains was increased by the fact that most of the country on the eastern side, being sterile, was thinly settled, so that there were few people who had any occasion to cross the mountains, while the approach to the passes was difficult, for there was little food or shelter to be had along this track. In the middle of the sixteenth century, however, Mendoza, Captain General of Chile, founded on the Argentine side the town which still bears his name. Placed at the foot of the mountains on the banks of a stream descending from the glaciers of Aconcagua, it was a well-watered spot in a thirsty land, and population slowly gathered to it. As Argentina began to fill up with settlers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and as railways began to be pushed farther and farther inland from the Atlantic coast, the notion of making a railway across the Andes began to dawn on enterprising minds, especially after the Brenner and Cenis lines had been constructed across and through the main chain of the Alps. At last an English company built a railroad up to this town of Mendoza, and nothing remained except to pierce the belt of mountain country. That, however, was no simple matter. The belt is indeed of no great width. The Cordillera, which in the latitude of Antofagasta is the western edge of a high plateau, has here narrowed itself down to a single very lofty ridge, the summits of which are from 18,000 to 23,000 feet in height. There are transverse lower ridges running at right angles to the main chain, both westward towards the Pacific and eastward to the Argentine plain, but as these ridges average only thirty-five miles in length on the latter and twenty-five on the former side, the whole distance from the low country on the eastern side to the low country on the western, does not exceed seventy miles, which is less than the width (between Luzern and Arona) of the much less lofty chain of the Alps at the point where the Gothard railway crosses it.

The central ridge of the Cordillera is, however, so continuously lofty and its slopes so steep as to be passable for beasts of burden at very few points and then only during the summer months. Among these points that which has for a long time, probably from days before the Spanish conquest, been most in use, is the Uspallata Pass, so called from a place about fifteen miles west of Mendoza on the mule track which runs from that town towards the mountains. As population increased, there was at last substituted for the mule track a road passable by vehicles. Finally, in 1887, a railroad began to be constructed up the long and winding river valley which leads from Mendoza to the main chain, while on the Chilean side, another railway was built up the shorter valley which rises to the western foot of the same ridge.

Thereafter, the work of construction stopped for a good while, passengers continuing to cross the ridge on foot or mule back, or in vehicles which painfully climbed the steep track that led over the top. At last a tunnel under this ridge was bored, and the whole line opened for traffic in 1909. The tunnel is only two and a half miles long, much shorter than those which penetrate the Alps at the Simplon, the Gothard and the Cenis. But its height above sea-level (12,000 feet) is much greater and the scenery along the line more striking. If any other trunk line of railroad in the world traverses a region so extraordinary, it has not yet been described. Till one is run from Kashmir to Kashgar, over or under the Karakoram Pass, this Andean line seems likely to "hold the record."

The description of the Uspallata route may begin from Valparaiso. From that port to the junction for Santiago at the station of Llai Llai the country is hilly, rather dry, with rolling pastures and meadows along the streams, and thickets of small trees or scrub on the slopes, – a country much like southern California, save that there are no oaks and no coniferous trees. Further on, the hills grow higher; there are rocks with patches of brilliant flowers, and occasional glimpses of the great range are caught up the openings of valleys. At a pretty place called Santa Rosa de los Andes, the Andean railway proper (Ferro Carril Transandino) begins, and we change into a car of narrower gauge.

This Transandine railroad, one of the few which does not belong to the Chilean government, is narrow gauge, and its construction involved difficulties unusual even in the case of mountain lines, not only because the grades were very steep, but also because the valleys leading up to the central ridge were, especially that on the Chilean side, extremely narrow. To have bored corkscrew or zigzag tunnels, like those on the Gothard railway in Switzerland, would have involved an expenditure altogether disproportionate to the returns to be expected from the traffic. It was therefore found necessary to adopt the cog-wheel system; and on those parts of the line where the grade is too steep for the ordinary locomotive a rack or cog-wheel apparatus is fixed between the rails, and the locomotive, fitted with a corresponding apparatus, climbs by its help. This reduces the speed of the train in ascending those steep parts, most of which are on the Chilean side, and unavoidably reduces also the freight-carrying capacity of the line. There is, therefore, not much heavy goods traffic passing over it.61 But to passengers who wish to save time and escape a sea voyage the gain is enormous, for while the transit from Valparaiso to Buenos Aires through the Straits of Magellan takes eleven days, the land journey by this Transandine railway can be accomplished in forty hours. The regular working of the trains had been interrupted in the winter before our visit by heavy falls of snow, but the construction of snowsheds, which was in progress, has probably by this time overcome such difficulties.

Travellers sleep at Santa Rosa in order to start early in the morning by the tri-weekly train which in twelve hours crosses the mountains to Mendoza. From the hotel at the station, we looked straight up a long, narrow valley to tremendous peaks of black rock thirty miles away to the east. How they stood out against the bright morning sky behind them, a few white clouds hovering above! One felt at a glance that this is one of the great ranges of the world, just as one feels the great musician in the first few chords of a symphony.

Up this valley runs the railway past little farm-houses, surrounded by stiff poplars, which thrive well here, though the tree is not a native, but brought from Europe. Fields, irrigated from the rushing stream beneath, are green with young corn; weeping willows droop over the watercourses, vines trail along the fronts of the cottages, and the pastures are bright with spring flowers. A cart road runs parallel to the line, and here one sees better than in the cities the true Chilean roto (peasant of mixed Spanish and Indian blood), in his rough coat and cotton shirt, baggy trousers and high boots fitted with large spurs, his low-crowned, narrow-brimmed felt or straw hat, and on his shoulders the thick homespun poncho characteristic of South America. His horse is usually near him, for they are all riders, a sturdy little animal with many saddle-cloths and a heavy, high-peaked saddle and heavy bit.

After eight or ten miles the valley narrows, and at its bottom there is only the torrent with sometimes a few yards of grass on one or other bank. The rock walls begin to rise more steeply, and the trees give place to shrubs. At a spot called the Soldier's Leap, the train runs on a shelf in the rock through a gorge over which the converging crags almost touch one another and shut out the light, the torrent roaring sixty feet below. One considerable stream, the Rio Blanco, descends from the south, but otherwise there are no side glens. Vast black precipices rise on the northern bank six or seven thousand feet above the river. Slender streamlets, perhaps the children of unseen snows behind, fall slowly from ledge to ledge, some of them lost in mid-air when a gust of the west wind sweeps them along.

At last, vegetation having now disappeared, a great black ridge rises in front across the end of the valley and seems to bar further progress. On its steep face, however, one can presently discover a sort of track, winding up it in zigzags. This is the old mule path by which travellers used to climb slowly to the pass, itself still far behind. The spot at its foot, where there are a few houses, is Juncal, the last place where the wayfarer halted to rest before he started for the formidable passage of the mountains. Here two glens opening from opposite sides meet at the foot of the great ridge. The glen to the north is short, descending abruptly from a semicircle of savage black peaks, the hollows between them filled with snow and ice. That to the south is long, narrow, and nearly level; it is a deep cleft which runs into the heart of the mountains as far as the west side of the mighty Tupungato, whose glaciers feed its torrent. Up this southern valley the railway, turning at right angles from its previous easterly direction, runs for some miles, then crosses and leaves the torrent, turns north and mounts along a narrow shelf cut out in the side of the great black ridge of Juncal, already mentioned. The slope rising above the line and falling below it to the valley is of terrific steepness. The grade is also steep and the locomotive toils and pants slowly upward by the aid of the cog-wheel, passing through tunnel after tunnel till at last it comes out, two thousand feet above Juncal, into a wide hollow surrounded by sharp peaks, those to the north streaked with beds of snow, those on the south of bare rock, because the snow has been melted off their sunward turned slopes. The bottom of this hollow is covered with enormous blocks that have fallen from the cliffs, and its northern end is filled by a small lake, part of whose surface was covered with ice. The fanciful name of Lago del Inca has been given to it. A scene more savage in its black desolation it would be hard to imagine. Compared to this frozen lake, the glacier lakes of the Swiss Alps, like the Märjelen See on the Aletsch glacier, are gentle and smiling. The strong sunlight and brilliant blue of the sky seemed to make the rocks blacker and bring out their absolute bareness with not so much as a moss or a lichen to relieve it. From the lake the railway, making another great sweep, climbs another slope and enters another still higher hollow, where it stops at the base of a steep ridge. Here a cluster of huts of corrugated iron, more than usually hideous in such a landscape, marks the mouth of the great tunnel, at a point 10,486 feet above the sea. In winter everything is covered deep with snow and now, in October, patches were still lying about and the cold, except in the sun, was severe. Big icicles were hanging from the eaves of the iron hut roofs.

Reserving for a later page some account of the top of the Pass and the colossal statue of Christ which has been set up there, I will describe the route, as travellers now take it, through the tunnel into Argentina and down the valley to the plains at Mendoza. The tunnel, cut through hard andesite rock, under a ridge fifteen hundred feet higher, is nearly three miles long, and the passage through it takes ten minutes. The air is cool and free from that sense of oppression which people complain of in the Gothard. The Duke of Wellington used to say that the business of a general in war consists largely in guessing what is on the other side of the hill. Whoever crosses a hill on foot or horseback sees the surrounding landscape change by degrees, and is more or less prepared for the view which the hilltop gives of what lies beyond. But when carried along in the darkness through the very core of a great mountain range expectation is more excited, and the sudden burst of a new landscape is more startling. So when, after the few minutes of darkness, we rushed out into the light of the Argentine side, there was a striking contrast. This eastern valley was wider and the peaks rose with a bolder, smoother sweep, their flanks covered with long slides of dark sand and gravel, their tops a line of bare precipices, not less lofty than those on the Chilean side but shewing less snow. The air was drier and the aspect of things not, indeed, less green, for there had been neither shrub nor plant visible since we passed Juncal, but more scorched and more aggressively sterile. There was far more colour, for on each side of the long valley that stretched before us to the eastward the declivities of the ridges that one behind another dipped towards it on both sides glowed with many tints of yellow, brown, and grey. A great flat-topped summit of a rich red, passing into purple, closed the valley in the distance. The mountains immediately above this upper hollow of the glen – it is called Las Cuevas – though nineteen or twenty thousand feet high, are imposing, not so much by their height, for the bottom of the hollow is itself ten thousand feet above sea-level, but rather by the grand lines with which they rise, the middle and lower slopes covered by sloping beds of grey ash and black sand, thousands of feet long, while at the head of the glen to the northwest glaciers hang from the crags that stand along the central range, the boundary of the two countries. In the presence of such majesty, the grim desolation of the scene is half forgotten.

From Las Cuevas the train runs rapidly down eastward, following the torrent through a confused mass of gigantic blocks that have fallen from the cliffs above, and after seven or eight miles, it passes the opening of a lateral glen down which there comes a far fuller torrent, bearing the water that has melted from the glaciers of Aconcagua. The huge mass of that mountain, loftiest of all the summits of the Western Hemisphere, is seen fifteen miles away, standing athwart the head of this lateral valley. It is a long ridge of snow, arching into two domes with a tremendous precipice of black rock facing south, on the upper edge of which is a cliff of névé. The falling fragments of thin ice feed a glacier below, just as a similar ice cliff above a similar precipice makes a little glacier thousands of feet below on the side of Mount Ararat. The top of Aconcagua is nearly twenty-three thousand feet high, and the valley at this point about eight thousand. Only in the Himalayas and the Andes can one see a peak close at hand soar into air fifteen thousand feet above the eye, and I doubt if there be any other peak even in the Andes which rises so near and so grandly above the spectator. It was first ascended in 1897 by an Englishman, Mr. Vines.62 The steepness of the snow slopes offered less difficulty than did the rarity of the air, the violence of the winds, the severity of the cold, besides the other hardships which are incident to camp life in this desolate region, where the climber, far from all supplies, waits day after day for weather steady enough to permit an attempt highly dangerous except under favouring climatic conditions.

A little below this point one reaches the spot called Puente del Inca (the Inca's bridge). Unusual natural phenomena are called after the Incas in these countries, just as they are after the Devil in Europe. Hot springs of some medicinal value which gush from the ground have been turned to account in a small bathing establishment to which a few visitors resort in summer. There is a real natural curiosity in the sort of bridge which the torrent has formed by cutting a way for itself underneath a detrital mass, the upper part of which has been bound hard together by the mineral deposits from the hot springs, so that it makes a firm roadway above the river roaring below. The place is, however, unspeakably lonely and dreary, bare and shelterless, too sterile for aught but a few low, prickly shrubs to grow. Over it whistles that fierce west wind which comes up from the Pacific in the afternoon, and sweeps down this valley chilled by the snowy heights which it has crossed.

The journey down the valley from this point is a piece of scenery to which it would be hard to find a parallel on any other railroad. It is like traversing the interior of an extinct volcano, for the rocks are all volcanic, of different ages and different colours, black and grey lavas, yellow and pink and whitish and bluish beds of tufa and indurated ash, sometimes with long streaks of gravel or dark sand streaming down from the base of the precipices above. At one place there is seen just under such a precipice, a row of sharp black pinnacles, not unlike miniature aiguilles, apparently the remains of a lava bed that has disintegrated, leaving its harder parts to stand erect. These are called the Penitentes, from a fancied resemblance to sinners in black robes standing or kneeling to do penance.63 I could perceive no trace of any defined craters or, indeed, of any recent volcanic phenomena in the valley, and should conjecture that subterranean fires had died out here many ages ago. Of the former presence of glaciers and the action of water on a great scale there are abundant signs in the remains of large moraines and in the masses of alluvium, through which the streams have cut deep trenches all the way down the valley. Its mountain walls rise so high and steep that the snow mountains behind are hidden. But at one point where a narrow glen comes down from the south, there is seen at the end of a long vista, thirty miles away, the great, blunt pyramid of Tupungato.64 Tupungato attains 22,000 feet, the upper six thousand of which are draped in white, and is, among the southern Andes, inferior only to Aconcagua and to Mercedario.