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Updated: May 8, 2025
The native troops were the Cholo Indians that who had been driven in from their homes back of the Cordilleras and almost forced to fight. They marched stolidly through the streets, turning their eyes neither to the right nor to the left, though hundreds of them had never seen a town before.
An almost equally dangerous foe to cultivation is a moth whose larva entirely destroys the ripe cacao beans; and which only cold and wind will kill. Humboldt mentions that cacao beans which have been transported over the chilly passes of the Cordilleras are never attacked by this pest.
The little town of Napo, called after the river, and situated as it is in the midst of a forest wilderness, offered all the advantages they required; and, choosing it as their temporary residence, they were soon engaged in searching for the black bear of the Cordilleras.
To the north extends a salt desert for upwards of one hundred miles, with a width of two hundred miles. It is crossed by the River Salado, which, rising in the Cordilleras, falls into the Plata, to the south of which rises a number of step-like terraces, sterile during the heats of summer, but covered with verdure after the rains of spring.
We at length enjoyed the refreshing breeze in the beautiful region of the arborescent erica and fern; and we were enveloped in a thick bed of clouds stationary at six hundred toises above the plain. The clouds having dispersed, we remarked a phenomenon which afterwards became familiar to us on the declivities of the Cordilleras.
In these hot climates, the oxen, though of Spanish breed, like those of the cold table-lands of Quito, are of a gentle disposition. A traveller runs no risk of being attacked or pursued, as we often were in our excursions on the back of the Cordilleras, where the climate is rude, the aspect of the country more wild, and food less abundant.
More than two-thirds of this basin are covered with water. It is bordered by two ranges of active volcanoes; on the east, in the Carribee Islands, between latitudes 13 and 16 degrees; and on the west in the Cordilleras of Nicaragua, Guatimala, and Mexico, between latitudes 11 and 20 degrees.
These Paramos indicate ten partial risings of the back of the Cordilleras. The declivity of the eastern chain is extremely rapid on the eastern side, where it bounds the basin of the Meta and the Orinoco; it is widened on the west by the spurs on which are situated the towns of Santa Fe de Bogota, Tunja, Sogamoso and Leiva.
The structure and arrangement of the Cordilleras of Quito, for example, are eminently suggestive of arrangement along lines of fissure. As shown by Alexander von Humboldt, the volcanic mountains are disposed in two parallel chains, which run side by side for a distance of over 500 miles northwards into the State of Columbia, and enclose between them the high plains of Quito and Lacunga.
These notions are highly interesting to geology and the geography of plants; because, in countries where no height has been measured, we may form an exact idea of the lowest height to which the Cordilleras rise, on looking into the map for the words paramo and nevado.
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