1835.] SEA-WORN VALLEYS. 355 
all sorts are extremely dear; as the distance from the town to 
the port is eighteen leagues, and the land carriage very expen- 
sive. A fowl costs five or six shillings; meat is nearly as dear 
as in England; firewood, or rather sticks, are brought on don- 
keys 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. 
June 26th.—TI 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 Cor- 
dillera, 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 bot- 
tom 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 southefn 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 ob- 
served 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 
