With eyelashes frozen together, you can yet be sunstruck. Teeth to teeth, cold and heat meet upon “the waste, chaotic battlefield of Frost and Fire.” Cold is besieged in vain by the sun at its hottest. This land of silent chaos takes on the cold of outer space so near by, which, shot through by the fierce heat of the sun, is incapable of absorbing any warmth.
The magical sun, dispelling somewhat the mountain-sickness, only brings with it another, even worse. For blazing across the snow-fields in its tropical fury, surumpe follows, snow-blindness, cured only by fresh vicuña flesh laid upon the eyes, so the Indians say.
The over-arching vault is indigo. Desolation is brightened by a radiant light, infinitely attenuated, “diaphanous as the starry void.” It caresses the bristling scenery. It penetrates caverns and fills them with a gold and purple mist. In the world of light and shade which it creates, even the shade gives light. Upon water, the light, startled by its own reflection, sparkles and dances and leaps.
Words give no idea of the brilliancy of the snow on the crests of the Andes, because there are no words made of sunlight and crystals: luminous, empyreal snowshine, shattered by the sun now and then into rainbow colors. As silence is perfect only because it has the possibility of being broken at any instant by a gigantic crash, so whiteness is the emblem of perfect purity only because the possibility of all color lies within.
He who has not galloped across an Andean puna chased by a tempest, has not known the full, wild force of the elements. Lost in a whirl of lightning, wind, and snow, his mule, maddened by electricity snapping off the ends of his ears, dashes from the thunder chasing at arms’ length. Red lightning zigzags between the summits. Blood-red cataracts tumble over the volcanic crags. Huge pieces of rock break loose and crash from the cliffs. Deep furrows are ripped up, following the lightning as it runs along close to the ground.
Lack of air and bitter cold are forgotten. Each flash acts like a fresh whip-sting to the mule. The compass snaps against its box. Magnetic sand leaps into the air and flies about in sheets. The rocks seem ablaze, the whole sky is on fire. The atmosphere quivers with uninterrupted peals, smothered in the gorges of granite, buffeted by the mountainsides, torn apart by the high peaks, till, finally overtaking each other, they are confounded in a mighty burst of thunder that breaks loose in the sky, and in a cosmic roar reverberates against the nothingness of outer space.
Then the sun slowly settles in calm. The striped walls flare in the sunset light, flamboyant as the bang of brass mortars in pagan idolatry. The mountains shine from base to summit, while “the night, grazing the soil and step by step raising its wide flight,—the dying light, fleeing from crest to crest, makes the most sublime summit resplendent, until the shadow covers all with its wing.”
All vague sounds subside into an “excess of silence.”
The last incandescent peak shines, and goes out.