- I hired a guide and eight mules to take me
into the Cordillera by a different line from my last excursion.
As the country was utterly desert, we took a cargo
and a half of barley mixed with chopped straw.
About two
leagues above the town a broad valley called the "Despoblado,"
or uninhabited, branches off from that one by which
we had arrived. Although a valley of the grandest dimensions,
and leading to a pass across the Cordillera, yet it is
completely dry, excepting perhaps for a few days during
some very rainy winter. The sides of the crumbling mountains
were furrowed by scarcely any ravines; and the bottom
of the main valley, filled with shingle, was smooth and nearly
level. No considerable torrent could ever have flowed down
this bed of shingle; for if it had, a great cliff-bounded
channel, as in all the southern valleys, would assuredly have
been formed. I feel little doubt that this valley, as well as
those mentioned by travellers in Peru, were left in the state we
now see them by the waves of the sea, as the land slowly rose. I
observed in one place, where the Despoblado was joined by a
ravine (which in almost any other chain would have been
called a grand valley), that its bed, though composed merely
of sand and gravel, was higher than that of its tributary.
A mere rivulet of water, in the course of an hour, would have
cut a channel for itself; but it was evident that ages had
passed away, and no such rivulet had drained this great
tributary. It was curious to behold the machinery, if such a
term may be used, for the drainage, all, with the last trifling
exception, perfect, yet without any signs of action. Every one
must have remarked how mud-banks, left by the retiring tide,
imitate in miniature a country with hill and dale; and here
we have the original model in rock, formed as the continent
rose during the secular retirement of the ocean, instead of
during the ebbing and flowing of the tides. If a shower of
rain falls on the mud-bank, when left dry, it deepens the
already-formed shallow lines of excavation; and so it is with
the rain of successive centuries on the bank of rock and soil,
which we call a continent.
We rode on after it was dark, till we reached a side ravine
with a small well, called "Agua amarga." The water
deserved its name, for besides being saline it was most
offensively putrid and bitter; so that we could not force
ourselves to drink either tea or mate. I suppose the distance
from the river of Copiapo to this spot was at least twenty-five
or thirty English miles; in the whole space there was not a
single drop of water, the country deserving the name of desert
in the strictest sense. Yet about half way we passed some old
Indian ruins near Punta Gorda:
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