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Updated: May 8, 2025
This tributary, which, fed by a hundred affluents, descends from the watershed of the Cordilleras, is a regular waterway opening into the very heart of Bolivia. A pirogue could pass up it and leave no trace of its passage, and a refuge could be found in some town or village beyond the Brazilian frontier.
The country was here studded along the shore with towns and villages, though the mighty chain of the Cordilleras, sweeping up abruptly from the coast, left but a narrow strip of emerald verdure, through which numerous rivulets, spreading fertility around them, wound their way into the sea.
After this we had a quick run, and once more the lofty summits of the Cordilleras greeted our eyes. Though I was but a young child when I had last seen them, so deep was the impression they had made on me that I recognised them at once. At length the Inca was at anchor off the city of Guayaquil.
Through a gorge in the Cordilleras rushes the Rio Ruiz, cold and bubbling, to glide, at last, with breadth and leisure, through an alluvial morass into the sea. In two hours El Nacional entered the river's mouth. The banks were crowded with a disposition of formidable trees. The sumptuous undergrowth of the tropics overflowed the land, and drowned itself in the fallow waters.
On the third day the fertile soil, watered by many rivers, was exchanged for a sandy plain, broken by a thorny mimosa scattered over the surface. This plain lay between the Cordillera of the Andes and the Coast Range. As the road advanced farther inland, the panorama of the Cordilleras became more and more striking.
They long to climb that tree in the Cordilleras and to look down, as Drake and Oxenham looked down, upon the old ocean in the East and the new ocean in the West; they would like to go on pilgrimage to Nombre de Dios Brothers, what a Gest was that! and to Cartagena, where Drake took the great Spanish ship out of the very harbour, under the very nose of the Spaniard, they would like to have been on board the Golden Hind, when Drake captured that nobly laden vessel, Our Lady of the Conception, and used her cargo of silver for ballasting his own ship.
The sun had disappeared behind the snowy peaks of the Cordilleras; but the beautiful Peruvian sky long retains, through the transparent veil of night, the reflection of his rays; the atmosphere is impregnated with a refreshing coolness, which in these burning latitudes affords freedom of breath; it is the hour in which one can live a European life, and seek without on the verandas some cooling gentle zephyr; it seems as if a metallic roof was then interposed between the sun and the earth, which, retaining the heat and suffering only the light to pass, offers beneath its shelter a reparative repose.
Of this splendid and interesting work, several editions have since been published in French, in twelve volumes octavo. It is upon it that his fame with the generality of readers mainly rests. II. Vues des Cordilleras et Monumens des Peuples Indigènes de l'Amerique two volumes folio: Paris, 1811.
It is very irregularly built at the bottoms of valleys, on the tops of hills, and on their steep and sometimes rugged sides, rising directly out of the blue ocean, with a succession of range after range of lofty mountains behind it the Cordilleras towering in the background beyond all. Gerard and I were very eager to get on shore; so was old Surley.
This inconstancy of climate, these somewhat rapid transitions from dry and transparent to humid and misty air, are inconveniences which Caracas shares in common with the whole temperate region of the tropics with all places situated between four and eight hundred toises of elevation, either on table-lands of small extent, or on the slope of the Cordilleras, as at Xalapa in Mexico, and Guaduas in New Granada.
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