From the Schänzli, Bern.
Over against these mountains there rose on the other side of the valley a polychrome hill, the Cerro Colorado, covered, they say, with magnetic sand, which leaps into the air and flies about in sheets and masses when a thunderstorm comes near—to the very natural horror of the local Indians. At such times, amidst the roar of thunder and the electric flashes, surrounded by a desert shaken by earthquakes and dotted over by cinders, and with this dancing fiend of a hill close at hand, ignorant people may be pardoned for imagining themselves possessed by a horde of rioting devils.
Not far away is the blood-red cañon of the Rio Loa, 360 feet deep. I stood at the edge of this profound meandering trench at an hour when the low westering sun struck full on one face of it and a dark shadow fell from the other. With this sanguinary hollow at my feet, I looked across a great flat plain towards countless volcanic hills, many of them perfectly symmetrical in form, shining in the mellow evening light. The sunset is the time to enjoy to the fullest this clean lunar landscape, enriched by the world's fair atmosphere, when the shadows are stealing across the flat and climbing the opposite crimson hills, whence they seem to drive the colour up to the soft still clouds, where it fades away in the purple pomp of oncoming night.
Is it possible, I wonder, by any words to convey to the reader the least notion of this sort of scenery? Picture to yourself a lake the size of Zug, or Annecy, or Orta. It is not a lake for all its flatness and the aspect of its shores, but a flat plain of salt, white as snow. Its banks and surroundings are not green, but wide-spreading sand, that stretches away and yet away till it vanishes perhaps into trembling mirage. Black spots are dotted all about as though newly scattered from some enormous pepper-pot. They are ashes. You can scarcely believe they are yet cold from the fire, that ejected them, however, ages ago. Yellow, crimson, green slopes rise nearer or farther away to form stately cones or ruined lumps of the crude earth. Alas! the picture is not paintable by me. Beheld, it smites the eye with a single indelible impression. Described, it is a mere succession of details and fragments, and there is no verbal lightning-stroke that will avail to smite them for an instant into simultaneous visibility.
Strictly speaking, what has been written above has no place in an Alpine book. Yet the interest of the Alps to me, or of any range of mountains, lies in the fact that they are a specimen range, that they resemble more or less other ranges from Arctics to Tropics, that they are examples of one large category of mundane phenomena. To understand the position and character of Alpine scenery in the scenery of mountains, we must consider what the Alps lack as well as what they possess. Every range of mountains, indeed, has its own special and purely local elements of character, but outside of them it likewise possesses many more in common with other ranges. The experienced Alpine climber will find himself, if not at home, at all events not far from home in the mountains of Spitsbergen, Greenland, or the Antarctic, in the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the Canadian Rockies; even in the snowy Cordillera of tropical Bolivia, or in the African groups of Kenya and Ruwenzori. The only kind of mountains, so far as I know, that will be wholly strange to him, and at first sight almost wholly incomprehensible, are the desert volcanoes. It has been for the purpose of bringing this fact clearly before his mind that I have felt myself justified in devoting a brief space to the character of such volcanic scenery.
THE END
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