Hot from their passage through the glowing veins of the mountains, springs bubble into life, sour, turbid, saturated with gases, possessed of weird powers, capable of giving life as well as of taking it away. Their waters turn to stone as they spread over the plain. In this frozen waste of glaciers, sheltering fire and magnetic iron within, all forces and elements are seething, though shrouded with snow. As the noise of water fills the desert, so the roar of fire can be heard among the frozen mountain-tops.
Long, long ago, a volcano was puffing out asphyxiating fumes. It melted the metal on the edge of its crater, and turned rocks burst from its own black mouth-pit to red and yellow and green. Fire boiled over the edge and advanced in a tide of flame down the mountainside and into the valleys. The favorites of the Sun who lived beside it complained to him of the ruin caused by the volcano. Somewhat irritated himself, he “smothered the genius of devastation in his lair,” covering the top of the mountain with an impenetrable cap of snow, leaving little, seraphic blue lakes here and there upon it as a hostage. This frozen giant, whose entrails the fire is devouring, still lies sleeping with his granite dreams.
When all the beneficent qualities inherent in a world have been wrested from it, and life has disappeared toward experiences elsewhere, or when a comet’s tail has swished life suddenly away, a wilderness like that of the high Andes would result—a place where chaos and disorder is the only rule. Yet the law of chaos we must believe is no law at all.
Stretched among these mountains is the vast table-land called puna, on which flourished the Indian civilizations so famous in history. Abundant rain falls, but cold prevents it from covering the ground with flowers. Reveling in the high pressure of the mountain-tops, humming-birds flit about in the snow. The finest morning begets the heaviest afternoon clouds, and warm atmospheric currents, quite definitely confined in the cold air, travel through the desolation.
The wind, seeming to tear up the ground and pulverize the summits, is unable to dissipate a mist which magnifies the rocks and presents the traveler’s giant shadow with a whole system of concentric rainbow halos—his apotheosis in the clouds. The wind brings with it cold clouds of dust laid only by a fresh fall of snow. It mummifies the beasts of burden which fall by the way. Mirages, too, the escort of tropical heat, shimmer upon these arctic plains.
With all the paraphernalia of the torrid zone, limitless vagaries of torrid force which knows no law of custom, the puna has no enjoyment of it. For the cold seems also to have taken on the exuberance of tropical nature.
You may lose your way in a snow-storm; or in the hot and stifling valleys, where the tropical sun can concentrate, you may die of the bite of a venomous serpent. Parched by fever-thirst, you may not drink the water, for it brings varieties of diseases, bounded by their valleys’ walls.
Your mule may sink into a morass or break his leg in a viscacha burrow. He may eat a poisonous mala yerba or garbanzillos. Broadly laden, he may be scraped off a bridle-path clinging to the sheer precipice. He may be carried away by the swift current of a glacier stream in attempting to ford it. He may collapse from lack of air and leave you stranded in a lifeless desert. Soroche-sick and burned to a crisp by the relentless cold, you urge on the staggering mule as he stops constantly to gulp the thin air. He cannot be satisfied, although he has a second set of nostrils cut through to ease his breathing and avert soroche.
Still the glaciers crawl down from brooding peaks above. The sun, magician of the bleak mountain regions, comes out and glints green on broken strata of the red mountains. It discovers all the bright colors in the hills of porphyry and clothes them with fresh shadows. It runs along a vein of shining mica to accuse it. It plunges into the middle of a lake of polished jet settled in the snow, “making a great, golden hole.”
A single hill in sunlight glows with streaks of iris-color, matching the rainbow forms as they appear above and fade again. Little cloud islets surround far-off peaks, sunk beneath the horizon. Pyramids of ice twinkle, and fantastic stone needles stand in rows too precipitous for snow to cling to their bare sides. They are called early inhabitants, which Pachacamac in his anger turned to stone. The air, though thin almost to disappearance, cuts like a razor-edge.