United States or Bosnia and Herzegovina ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The South American continent, it will thus be seen, consists of several distinctly different descriptions of country: the long line of the Cordilleras, with their snow-capped peaks and their lofty punas or high table-lands, and the narrow strip of arid soil at their western base; the three separate mountain-systems of Venezuela, Guiana, and the Brazils; the mighty forests bordering the great rivers and their tributaries, to which must be added the wooded heights of the inter-tropical regions, where tall trees, including several palms, flourish at an elevation of many thousand feet above the level of the ocean; and lastly, the wide-extending regions of the Llanos and the Pampas.
Squier does not give us the date of his explorations in Peru, but he tells us that they occupied him two years, during which he "crossed and recrossed the Cordillera and the Andes from the Pacific to the Amazonian rivers, sleeping in rude Indian huts or on bleak punas in the open air, in hot valleys or among eternal snows, gathering with eager zeal all classes of facts relating to the country, its people, its present and its past."
Night came on, and somehow we got off the track crossing one of the Punas those elevated tablelands, you know, up among the mountains and when the mule could go no farther we camped, and the next morning I found myself in an almost circular valley, completely walled in by enormous mountains, save for the narrow, crooked gorge through which we had stumbled by the purest accident.
Word Of The Day