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Turning to the island of Marguerita, composed, like the peninsula of Araya, of micaceous slate, and anciently linked with that peninsula by the Morro de Chacopata and the islands of Coche and Cubagua, we seem to recognize in the two mountainous groups of Macanao and La Vega de San Juan traces of a third coast-chain of the Cordillera of Venezuela.
The course of the Amazon, which is first directed north, then east, changes near Puyaya, three leagues north-east of Tomependa. Throughout the whole distance between Tambillo and San Borja, the waters force a way, more or less narrow, across the sandstones of the Cordillera of Chachapoyas.
But everything human is ephemeral and I cannot disguise from myself the possibility of some great disaster befalling you. Those mountains contain both gold and silver, and an invasion of treasure-seekers, either from the sea or the Cordillera would be the ruin of the mission. My poor people would be demoralized, perhaps destroyed, and you would be compelled to quit Quipai and return to the world.
The valley of the Cachapual, in the part where the boulders occur, bursts through the high ridge of Cauquenes, which runs parallel to, but at some distance from, the Cordillera. This ridge has been subjected to excessive violence; trachytic lava has burst from it, and hot springs yet flow at its base.
To any one who has clambered over the passes of the Cordillera Uilcapampa it is not surprising that this military expedition was a failure or that the Inca, warned by keen-sighted Indians posted on appropriate vantage points, could have succeeded in defeating a small force of weary soldiers armed with the heavy blunderbuss of the seventeenth century.
I observed some appearances on the plains at the eastern and opposite foot of the Cordillera which are worth notice, as showing that the sea there long acted at nearly the same level as on the basin-plains of Chile.
The road passed over the level but narrow plain, bounded on one side by lofty hills, and on the other by the Cordillera. The next day we turned up the valley of the Rio Cachapual, in which the hot-baths of Cauquenes, long celebrated for their medicinal properties, are situated. The suspension bridges, in the less frequented parts, are generally taken down during the winter when the rivers are low.
Northward of Mendoza, these escarpments become broken and quite obliterated; and it does not appear that they ever enclosed a lake-like area: I conclude, therefore, that they were formed by the sea, when it reached the foot of the Cordillera, like the similar escarpments occurring at so many points on the coasts of Chile and Patagonia.
As the twilight deepened, and the stars came faintly into sight in the dark-blue vault above, the thoughts of Lawrence became strangely saddened, and, gradually quitting the scene of peaceful beauty on which he gazed, sped over the Cordillera of the Andes to that home of his boyhood which now lay in ashes.
In places they seem like bluffs cut by an ancient lake, but suddenly they change their altitude or pass from one drainage area to another as no lake-formed strand could possibly do. In other parts of the cordillera, mountains have been formed by a single arching of the crust without any breaking.
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