There were grades as steep as ten per cent. in the rackrail line down which I strode at forty cents a mile. In places the western face of the range was so steep that the mountain fell almost sheer for hundreds of feet to the railroad, the loose shale seeming ready to drop in mighty avalanches and bury everything at the slightest disturbance, and suggesting some of the problems faced by the American engineers who built the more difficult Chilean half of the transandino. The station of Juncal, perched on a rock, posed as a railway restaurant, but at sight of its price-list I fled in speechless awe, and at the next stream below fell upon the lunch I had been brilliant enough to pilfer from my Argentine supper the evening before. The tiny brook that had trickled from under the snow below the “Cristo” had swollen to a scarcely fordable river when, toward evening, with twenty-eight miles, or more than eleven dollars’ worth, of ups and downs behind me, the huts that had begun to appear, carelessly tucked in among the broken rocks and mammoth boulders of the Rio Juncal, collected at last into a little village called Rio Blanco, in which I found an amateur lodging. I had heard that Chile was different from the other west-coast countries, but this first glimpse of it scarcely bore out the assertion. Here were the same squalor, cur dogs, chicha—even though it was made from grapes—Indian fatalism and indifference to progress with which I had grown so familiar in the other lands of the Andes.
Descending still farther into Chile next morning, I met a fellow tramp limping toward the summit, a mere bundle of whiskers and rags, evidently a German, though he was either too surly or too sad to speak, carrying all his possessions in a grain-sack, his feet wrapped in many folds of burlap. The twenty-two miles left were an easy day’s stroll, much of it through the rocky canyon of the river that had roared all night in my ears. In mid-morning I passed the famous “Salto del Soldado,” where the railroad leaps across an abysmal chasm with the Rio Juncal brawling and foaming at its bottom, from one tunnel directly into another, and over which hovers the legend of some soldier jumping to fame and death in the revolt against Spanish rule. I had dinner in an outdoor dining-room under a red-flowered arbor beside the track, where a large steak—of rhinoceros, I fancy—corn cakes fried in grease, excellent coffee, and endless chatter from the pudding-like Chilean woman serving it, cost only a peso—and the peso of Chile is but little money indeed. The woman had never in her life been a mile farther up the valley, so that I was an object of the deepest interest to her as a denizen of the unknown world above and beyond the jagged snow-clad range that bounded her horizon.
By afternoon the weather had become like May at home. There was nothing autumnal about it except the pencil-like Lombardy poplars touched with yellow along the beautiful valley of the Juncal, back up which one looked almost wonderingly at the glacier-capped range walling off the rest of the world. The country was very dry, the hills inclosing it rocky and half-sterile, yet enlivened by the green of the organ cactus which grew plentifully, the more distant ranges showing a faint red tinge through their general blackness. Some of the parched fields were being plowed with oxen. Gradually the mountains flattened themselves out, a genuinely Andean traffic of mules, straw-laden donkeys, and half-Indian arrieros on foot grew up along the broad highway following the valley, now well inhabited, chiefly in huts thrown together of a few reeds or willows, as if there was nothing to look forward to but perpetual summer. The once narrow gorge had expanded to a broad, well-settled valley that suggested California when, in the later afternoon, footsore, but many dollars ahead, I wandered into the town of Santa Rosa de los Andes, junction point of the most expensive and one of the cheapest railroads in the world, and found my half-forgotten baggage awaiting me.
At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the Andes” in a bleak and arid setting
The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile
On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in among the boulders
