XVI SEA -WORN VALLEYS 379 



carnage very expensive. A fowl costs five or six shillings ; 

 meat is nearly as dear as in England ; firewood, or rather 

 sticks, are brought on donkeys from a distance of two and 

 three days' journey within the Cordillera ; and pasturage for 

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

 wonderfully exorbitant 



[une 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 completely 

 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 consider- 

 able 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- 



