CHARACTERISTIC VEGETATION. 151 



quarter of an hour for breakfast. The arrangements 

 were rather rough, but the food excellent— much 

 superior, indeed, to what one commonly finds at an 

 English refreshment-room. This is a junction station, 

 and a train was in readiness to take passengers from 

 Santiago or Valparaiso by a branch line up the valley 

 of the Aconcagua to San Felipe and Santa Rosa de 

 los Andes. The Santiago train here leaves that valley, 

 and, turning abruptly to the south, commences a long 

 and rather steep ascent of the ridge that divides the 

 basin of the Maipo from that of the Aconcagua. To 

 our right rose the Cerro del Roble, about 7250 feet in 

 height, one of the highest of the coast range.* 



Here I first encountered the characteristic aspect 

 of the hilly region of Central Chili. A tall columnar 

 cactus {Cereus Quiscd) is the most conspicuous plant. 

 Sometimes with a solitary stem, but usually having 

 two or three together from the same root, they stand 

 bolt upright from fifteen to twenty-five feet in 

 height. Next to this the commonest conspicuous 

 plant is a large species of Puya, belonging to the 

 pine-apple family, with long, stiff, spiky leaves, and 

 these two combined to give a strange and some- 

 what weird appearance to the vegetation. Here and 

 there were dense masses of evergreen bushes or small 

 shrubs, and more rarely small solitary trees. Among 

 these was probably the species of beech (Fagus obliqua 

 of botanists) which the natives call roble (or oak), 

 there being, in fact, no native oaks in America south 



* This is doubtless the summit described by Darwin under the name 

 Campana de Quillota. He gives the height as 6400 feet above sea- 

 level. The figures in the text are taken from the Chilian survey. 



