26 
Annual Reports of Academy of 
the morrow. That night, the eighth of the month, the first 
September rain fell,—a thunderstorm that chilled us on that high 
ridge. 
The next morning we started at daybreak; but it proved a matter 
of over three hours to advance a few rods through that thicket. 
The cliffs ahead were too precipitous for us to assume that we could 
reach our goal by any but the known route. Now, within a mile 
or so we could see the cliffs,—an hour’s clear progress would have 
brought us to them; yet it required hours of cutting through tangle, 
scrambling up cliffs, and feeling our way through virgin forest such 
as that of the previous day, to bring us at last, in the early after¬ 
noon, to the paramo. 
After passing through a narrow belt of shrubs we came out on 
open grassy paramo, although still above us rose cliffs, deep-green 
with a coat of small trees and bushes. Indeed, I was not to reach 
the summit of these, and so to look beyond at the higher elevations 
of Tatama. Lack of provisions, and the certainty of rain, meant 
our return on the morrow; and for this day the curtailing of our 
time on the paramo to two hours and a half. Perhaps, had the 
flora been so meagre as that of Chaquiro, even this little time 
might have sufficed, but on the paramo of Tatama the flora proved 
exceedingly rich. Seldom have I found at such elevations a greater 
variety of plants; never a variety more interesting. Even photo¬ 
graphy had to be put aside in order to use every moment in gather¬ 
ing the plants before me. 
From an advance survey it was natural to expect only slight dif¬ 
ference in the kinds of plants growing upon isolated portions of the 
same chain as near together as are Chaquiro and Cerro Tatama. 
Experience elsewhere had taught me to expect some divergence, 
but I was wholly unprepared for the great difference between the 
plant-life of these two summits. Except among plants with special 
means of dispersal by wind, I found little in common in the upper 
zones of life. Climbing to either highland one passes from the 
tropical forest into the subtropical forest, and these two lowest 
zones show little if any peculiarity in either region. The lower 
summits of the Western Andes and the passes over the chain lie 
no higher than the subtropical forest, and it is only above this level 
that the various portions of the cordillera are isolated. Climbing 
to Tatama, there is an abrupt change from subtropical to temperate 
