United States or Western Sahara ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It extends for many hundred miles, forming the western flank of the Chilean Cordillera; and even at Iquique in Peru, 850 miles north of the southernmost point examined by me in Chile, the coast-escarpment which rises to a height of between two and three thousand feet is thus composed.
For the mild, although repressive viceregal sway is substituted that of a swarm of military chieftains, who, fighting as patriots against Liniers and his ill-fated troops, as rivals with each other, or as montanero-freebooters against all combined, swept the plains with their harrying lancers from the seacoast to the base of the Cordillera.
Hence it would appear that the Cordillera has been, probably with some quiescent periods, a source of volcanic matter from an epoch anterior to our cretaceo-oolitic formation to the present day; and now the earthquakes, daily recurrent on some part of the western coast, give little hope that the subterranean energy is expended.
From time to time, as the course of the river varied, we had distant views of the rocky mountains of the Endicott Range, or, as it might be written, the Endicott Range of the Rocky Mountains, for such, in fact, it is the western and final extension of the great American cordillera.
The Cordillera of the Andes, considered in its whole extent, from the rocky wall of the island of Diego Ramirez to the isthmus of Panama, is sometimes ramified into chains more or less parallel, and sometimes articulated by immense knots of mountains. We distinguish nine of those knots, and consequently an equal number of branching-points and ramifications. The latter are generally bifurcations.
To explain these great effects of volcanic reactions, and to prove that the group or system of the volcanoes of the West India Islands may sometimes shake the continent, I have cited the Cordillera of the Andes.
When in that country I wondered how any mountain-chain could supply such masses and not have been utterly obliterated. We must not now reverse the wonder, and doubt whether all-powerful time can grind down mountains even the gigantic Cordillera into gravel and mud. The appearance of the Andes was different from that which I had expected.
This Cordillera loses itself northward,* between Minas Novas and the southern extremity of the Capitania of Bahia, in 16 degrees latitude. In the same manner the Serra do Espinhaco follows constantly the direction of a meridian, towards the north; while towards the south it runs south-east, and terminates about 25 degrees latitude.
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."
We shall soon see that this western chain appears to be linked by the spurs that advance to the west, with the maritime Alps of California. Finally, the central Cordillera of Anahuac, which is the most elevated, runs first from south-east to north-west, by Zacatecas towards Durango, and afterwards from south to north, by Chihuahua, towards New Mexico.
Word Of The Day