^52 THE DESPOBLADO. [chap. xvi. 



animals is a shilling a day : all this for South America is 

 wonderfully exorbitant. 



June 26th. — I hired a guide and eight mules to take me 

 into the Cordillera by a different line from my last excursion. 

 As the country was utterly desert, we took a cargo and a 

 half of barley mixed with chopped straw. About two leagues 

 above the town, a broad valley called the ," Despoblado," 

 or uninhabited, branches off from that one by which we had 

 arrived. Although a valley of the grandest dimensions, 

 and leading to a pass across the Cordillera, yet it is com- 

 pletely dry, excepting perhaps for a few days during some 

 very rainy winter. The sides of the crumbling mountains 

 were furrowed by scarcely any ravines ; and the bottom 

 of the main valley, filled with shingle, was smooth and 

 nearly level. No considerable torrent could ever have 

 flowed down this bed of shingle ; for if it had, a great 

 cliff-bounded channel, as in all the southern valleys, would 

 assuredly have been formed. I feel little doubt that this 

 valley, as well as those mentioned by travellers in Peru, 

 were left in the state we now see them by the waves of 

 the sea, as the land slowly rose. I observed in one place, 

 where the Despoblado was joined by a ravine (which in 

 almost any other chain would have been called a grand 

 valley), that its bed, though composed merely of sand and 

 gravel, was higher than that of its tributary. A mere 

 rivulet of water, in the course of an hour, would have cut 

 a channel for itself ; but it was evident that ages had passed 

 away, and no such rivulet had drained this great tributary. 

 It was curious to behold the machinery, if such a term 

 may be used, for the drainage, all, with the last trifling- 

 exception, perfect, yet without any signs of action. Every 

 one must have remarked how mud-banks, left by the retiring 

 tide, imitate in miniature a country with hill and dale ; 

 and here we have the original model in rock, formed as 

 the continent rose during the secular retirement of the 

 ocean, instead of during the ebbing and flowing of the 

 tides.. If a shower of rain falls on the mud-bank, when 

 left dry, it deepens the already-formed shallow lines of 

 excavation ; and so it is with the rain of successive centuries 

 on the bank of rock and soil, which we call a continent. 



We rode on after it was dark, till we reached a side 

 ravine with a small well, called " Agua amarga. '' The 

 water deserved its name, for besides being saline it was 



