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Updated: June 20, 2025
We know at least that at Coquimbo, where five escarpments occur in a height of 364 feet, the successive elevations, if they have been sudden, cannot have been very great.
The bluffs, both above and below, are very precipitous, the middle and lower beds of the Third Magnesian Limestone forming perpendicular escarpments, frequently studded with cedar, some occurring on top of the bridge. A perfectly clear stream of water courses through this valley.
These pinnacles are very hard to climb. As they are surrounded by a chasm of varying width the bergschrund which one must leap over, and as their precipitous escarpments afford but small footholds, most of the tourists climbing the mountain content themselves with reaching the bergschrund and from there enjoy the panorama.
The Palazzo Gabrielli, for two or three centuries the chief dwelling of the Orsini, is built in the midst of the city like a great fortification, with escarpments and buttresses and loop-holes; and at the main gate there is still a portcullis which sinks into the ground by a system of chains and balance weights and is kept in working order even now.
Hamlets are built where there is scarce foothold in the detritus, below perpendicular escarpments of rock, cut clean like the façades of a Gothic temple. A tributary of the river is crossed by an admirable stone bridge of two arches, with a central pier and cut-water of magnificent boldness and strength, and with two images of lions guarding its abutment.
An enormous area of this country seems to be composed of volcanic rocks chiefly in the form of sheets of basaltic lava, which rise into high plateaux, and break off in steep sometimes precipitous mural escarpments along the sides of the valleys. These are divisible into the following series: The Ashangi Volcanic Series.
Whoever has beheld a cloud which has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments can imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows of lofty houses. It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed; hence a twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. The combatants could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other, short as it was.
I encounter huge basins like the craters of volcanoes, formed by the circling swirl; deep chasms and valleys, whose sides are walls of sand, steep, often vertical, and not unfrequently impending with comb-like escarpments.
The streams rest conformably on the white sedimentary beds, but I nowhere saw the actual junction; nor did I anywhere see the white beds actually superimposed on the lava; but some way up the valley at the foot of the uppermost escarpments, they must be thus superimposed.
Away to the north stand out the Barnard Islands, and the island-like headland of Double-Point. Rocky walls and ledges intersected by narrow clefts in which the sea boils, gigantic masses of detached granite split and weathered into strange shapes and corniced and bridged at high water-mark by oysters, bold escarpments and medleys of huge boulders, extend along the weather side.
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