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The central area of the Malaspina is also free from debris; but on the outer edge large quantities of englacial drift are exposed by surface melting and form a belt of morainic waste a few feet thick and several miles wide, covered in part with a luxuriant forest, beneath which the ice is in places one thousand feet in depth.
The little that was known, up to the end of the last century, of the astronomical geography of the interior of the New Continent, was owing to these estimable and laborious men, the French and Spanish academicians, who measured a meridian line at Quito, and to officers who went from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres to join the expedition of Malaspina.
There was a stream of sound in our ears, and in my brain a rhythmic dance of beauties caught through the long-drawn glorious golden autumn-day. The hamlet and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spur above Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains of Luni. This is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and is still in the possession of the Marquis of that name.
Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical precision of heraldic irony. Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious view to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the "Inferno."
The sight of the massive snow face of Mt. St. Elias, rising 18,002 feet above the immense stretches of the Malaspina glacier, called to mind the successful Abruzzi expedition, which reached the top of this mountain a few years ago.
And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical precision of heraldic irony. Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious view to westward, I thought of Dante.
Elena, Camerones, Malaspina, and as far south as the Paps of Pineda, is a purplish-pink or brownish claystone porphyry, sometimes laminated, sometimes slightly vesicular, with crystals of opaque feldspar and with a few grains of quartz; hence these porphyries resemble those immediately to be described at Port Desire, and likewise a series which I have seen from P. Alegre on the southern confines of Brazil.
We remained with our eyes fixed on the castle of St. Antonio, where the unfortunate Malaspina was then a captive in a state prison. On the point of leaving Europe to visit the countries which this illustrious traveller had visited with so much advantage, I could have wished to have fixed my thoughts on some object less affecting.
Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce. Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's." Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino.
This vast country between Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Villabella, and Matogrosso, is one of the least known parts of South America. The two spurs of Cordova and Salta present only a mountainous territory of small elevation, and linked to the foot of the Andes of Chile. Mr. Haenke, after having followed the expedition of Alexander Malaspina, settled at Cochabamba in 1798.
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