CHAPTER I
THE HIGH REGIONS
I
No Peruvian thinks of zones differing from his own as being remote geographical localities. Peru contains them all. He does not have to travel over the face of the earth for a change of climate, but makes short, domestic, vertical journeys instead. Living under his banana groves among his sugar-fields in the lush coast valley, if he feels need of fresher air, he takes a trip up to the temperate zone, where apple orchards and wheat-fields lie spread out in a recess of the mountains, and strawberries redden to perfection. Has he curiosity to see an arctic storm, he goes a little higher, coming out upon the bitter table-land where crests of glaciers cut the sky.
The Andes, youngest of mountains—what a weirdly tossed world! All the most obscure and harsh substances of the planet have been heaped up here. The rough places of earth have turned over and reached up where they brush against the firmament.
Volcanic power has its domain in these high regions of earth, where nature is in anarchy, possessed of unnatural powers. It is a great, uneasy wilderness, where torrents rattle through daring gorges, only to fall a thousand feet, scattering into a dust of foam. Icicles hang from every joint between the stones.
It is a colossal, brutal land, fresh from the cataclysm, whose ponderous masses of rock are all sterile from cold, all silent under perpetual snow. In its clearness of atmosphere sparkles a new conception of the night-time sky. It is a land where thin layers of lichens are the only trace of plant life, where condors wheel about the highest pinnacles, and silver lies buried deep in the ground. It is the lair of mercury-mines which paralyze those working in them, where hot and cold fountains mingle to make one river, where springs of tar and rivers of peat ooze from suffocation within.
A TRESTLE OF THE HIGHEST RAILWAY IN THE WORLD, ACROSS THE INFIERNILLO.