166 SOUTH AMERICA 



belt, and lead up to an alpine zone of dwarf crawling 

 perennials, only scattered on shingles, but more densely 

 grouped on peaty tracts. This landscape continues till 

 the extreme south of Patagonia is reached, when another 

 more cheerful aspect replaces it. It is a transition from 

 the western timbered Andes to the dry steppes of the 

 eastern plain — a park landscape where the trees are 

 deciduous. This dry portion of the Argentine cordillera 

 is useless to man : it is condemned to remain unused and 

 barren, but the south Patagonian slopes may some day 

 lend themselves to pastoral industries. 



Western Andes. Of the equatorial and Colombian 

 portions a brief mention has already been made (p. 131). 



Peruvian Andes. The Peruvian Andes have been 

 divided into a lower belt, the ' cuesta ' or coast, and an 

 upper belt, the 'sierra', or mountain. The cuesta is 

 rainless and hot, with frequent dew and mists at night, 

 and except for a narrow, sandy coastal strip, it is waste, 

 rocky, and hilly, and barely supports a scattered thorny 

 brush of mesquites and acacias, studded with cerei, 

 opuntias, and cacti, where occasional showers give rise 

 to an ephemeral crop of brightly flowered herbs. The 

 narrow, extremely arid coastal plain is crossed by 

 numerous short, snow -fed mountain streams, the lower 

 valleys of which run as parallel oases, each a small Egypt 

 between the intervening wastes. Each valley possesses 

 its little town, with sometimes a port at its mouth. 



Above the coast-belt rises the cordillera or sierra 

 belt from 7,000 to 12,000 feet, frequently wrapped in 

 clouds, and for that reason cooler and moister, with also 

 a somewhat denser covering of evergreen shrubs and 

 shrubby perennials. To this zone we owe some of our 

 garden plants, amongst them, varieties of calceolarias, 

 lupins, clematis, echeverias, and tobaccos. It gradually 



