340 PORTILLO PASS 



wear of the hills, they project above the surface of the ground. 

 Secondly, almost every labourer, especially in the northern parts 

 of Chile, understands something about the appearance of ores. 

 In the great mining provinces of Coquimbo and Copiapo, 

 firewood is very scarce, and men search for it over every hill and 

 dale ; and by this means nearly all the richest mines have there 

 been discovered. Chanuncillo, from which silver to the value 

 of many hundred thousand pounds has been raised in the course 

 of a few years, was discovered by a man who threw a stone at 

 his loaded donkey, and thinking that it was very heavy, he 

 picked it up, and found it full of pure silver : the vein occurred 

 at no great distance, standing up like a wedge of metal. The 

 miners, also, taking a crowbar with them, often wander on 

 Sundays over the mountains. In this south part of Chile the 

 men who drive cattle into the Cordillera, and who frequent every 

 ravine where there is a little pasture, are the usual discoverers. 



20tJi. — As we ascended the valley, the vegetation, with the 

 exception of a few pretty alpine flowers, became exceedingly 

 scanty ; and of quadrupeds, birds, or insects, scarcely one could 

 be seen. The lofty mountains, their summits marked with a 

 few patches of snow, stood well separated from each other ; the 

 valleys being filled up with an immense thickness of stratified 

 alluvium. The features in the scenery of the Andes which 

 struck me most, as contrasted with the other mountain chains 

 with which I am acquainted, were, — the flat fringes sometimes 

 expanding into narrow plains on each side of the valleys, — the 

 bright colours, chiefly red and purple, of the utterly bare and 

 precipitous hills of porphyry, — the grand and continuous wall- 

 like dikes, — the plainly -divided strata which, where nearly 

 vertical, formed the picturesque and wild central pinnacles, but 

 where less inclined, composed the great massive mountains on 

 the outskirts of the range, — and lastly, the smooth conical piles 

 of fine and brightly-coloured detritus, which sloped up at a high 

 angle from the base of the mountains, sometimes to a height of 

 more than 2000 feet. 



I frequently observed, both in Tierra del Fuego and within 

 the Andes, that where the rock was covered during the greater 

 part of the year with snow, it was shivered in a very extra- 

 ordinary manner into small angular fragments. Scoresby ^ has 



* Scoresby's Arctic Regions, vol. i. p. 122. 



