From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young People

by Sven Anders Hedin

On another occasion you may remark that Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia lie in an almost continuous curve in the eastern hemisphere, while America has the western hemisphere all to itself. There it lies as a huge dividing wall between two oceans. You wonder why the New World has such a peculiar form stretching from pole to pole.

Perhaps you think that the Creator must have changed His mind at the last moment, and decided to make two distinct continents of America. You seem to see the marks of His omnipotent hands. With the left He held North America, and in the right South America. Where Hudson Bay runs into the land lay His forefinger, and the Gulf of Mexico is the impression of His thumb. South America He gripped with the whole hand, and there is only a slight mark of the thumb just on the boundary between Peru and Chile. It almost looks as if He grasped the continent so tightly that its western border was crumpled into great wrinkles and folds which we men call the Rocky Mountains and the Andes. If we did not know that it is the ocean winds that feed the rivers with rain, we should be tempted to believe that the Mississippi, Amazons, Rio de la Plata, and other rivers were moisture still running out of the mountains under the pressure of the Creator's hands.

And so He has divided America into two. In one place the connection broke, but the fragments still remain, and we call them the West Indies or Antilles. In other places the material was too tough. Mexico thins out southwards as though it were going to end in the sea, and Central America is stretched like a wrung-out cloth. Between Guatemala and Honduras it is almost torn through, and the large lake of Nicaragua is another weak point. But where Costa Rica passes into the Isthmus of Panama the connection between the two halves of the New World has been almost broken and hangs only by a hair. The peninsula, however, resisted the pull, and has held, though reduced to a breadth of forty miles.

Then, of course, man must come and help the Creator to finish the work which He Himself found very good. It was long before men ventured on so gigantic an undertaking, but as they had succeeded in separating Africa from Asia, it was no doubt feasible to blast a canal through the hills of the Isthmus of Panama, 300 feet high. It has cost many years and many millions, but the great cutting will soon be ready which will sever South America from the northern half of the New World. It is surely a splendid undertaking to make it possible for a vessel to sail from Liverpool direct to San Francisco without rounding the whole of South America, and at a single blow to shorten the distance by near 6000 miles.

The bridge still stands unbroken, however, and we come dryshod over to South America just where the Andes begin their mighty march along all the west coast. Their ranges rise, here in double and there in many folds, like ramparts against the Pacific Ocean, and between the ranges lie plains at a height of 12,000 feet. Here also lift themselves on high the loftiest summits of the New World—Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest of all, an extinct volcano covered with eternal snow and glistening glaciers; Sorata in Bolivia; the extinct volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador, like a marble dome; and lastly, one of the earth's most noted mountains, Cotopaxi, the highest of all still active volcanoes (Plate XXXV.). Stand for a moment in the valley above the tree limit, where only scattered plants can find hold in the hard ground. You see a cone as regular as the peak of Fujiyama. The crater is 2500 feet in diameter, and from its edge, 19,600 feet high, the snow-cap falls down the mountain sides like the rays of a gigantic starfish. When the Spanish conquerors, nearly four hundred years ago, took possession of these formerly free countries, Cotopaxi had one of its fearful eruptions; and even in more recent times European travellers have seen the mantle of snow melt away as from a lighted furnace, while a brownish-red reflection from the glowing crater lighted up the devastation caused in the villages and valleys at the foot of the mountain by the flood of melted snow and streams of lava.

SOUTH AMERICA.

Even under the burning sun of the equator, then, these giants stand with mantles of eternal snow and glittering blue fields of ice in the bitterly cold atmosphere. Up there you would think that you were near the pole. There are no trees on the high crests, which seem to rise up from the depths of the Pacific Ocean; but the climate is good, and agriculture yields sustenance to men. On the eastern flanks, which are watered by abundant rains, the vegetation is exceedingly luxuriant, and here the traveller enters the primeval forests of the tropics. Here is the home of the cinchona tree, here orchids bloom among the tall trunks, and here whole woods are entangled in a network of lianas. Immense areas of Brazil and Bolivia are covered with impenetrable primeval forests, which even still present an obstacle to the advance of the explorer.

Thus we find in the Andes all zones from the hot to the cold, from tropical forests to barren heights, from the equator to high southern latitudes.