340 
PORTILLO PASS 
CHAP. 
wear of the hills, they project above the surface of the ground. 
Secondly, almost every labourer, especially in the northern parts 
of Chile, understands something about the appearance of ores. 
In the great mining provinces of Coquimbo and Copiapo, 
firewood is very scarce, and men search for it over every hill and 
dale ; and by this means nearly all the richest mines have there 
been discovered. Chanuncillo, from which silver to the value 
of many hundred thousand pounds has been raised in the course 
of a few years, was discovered by a man who threw a stone at 
his loaded donkey, and thinking that it was very heavy, he 
picked it up, and found it full of pure silver : the vein occurred 
at no great distance, standing up like a wedge of metal. The 
miners, also, taking a crowbar with them, often wander on 
Sundays over the mountains. In this south part of Chile the 
men who drive cattle into the Cordillera, and who frequent every 
ravine where there is a little pasture, are the usual discoverers. 
20 th .—As we ascended the valley, the vegetation, with the 
exception of a few pretty alpine flowers, became exceedingly 
scanty ; and of quadrupeds, birds, or insects, scarcely one could 
be seen. The lofty mountains, their summits marked with a 
few patches of snow, stood well separated from each other ; the 
valleys being filled up with an immense thickness of stratified 
alluvium. The features in the scenery of the Andes which 
struck me most, as contrasted with the other mountain chains 
with which I am acquainted, were,—the flat fringes sometimes 
expanding into narrow plains on each side of the valleys,—the 
bright colours, chiefly red and purple, of the utterly bare and 
precipitous hills of porphyry,—the grand and continuous wall- 
like dikes,—the plainly-divided strata which, where nearly 
vertical, formed the picturesque and wild central pinnacles, but 
where less inclined, composed the great massive mountains on 
the outskirts of the range,—and lastly, the smooth conical piles 
of fine and brightly-coloured detritus, which sloped up at a high 
angle from the base of the mountains, sometimes to a height of 
more than 2000 feet. 
I frequently observed, both in Tierra del Fuego and within 
the Andes, that where the rock was covered during the greater 
part of the year with snow, it was shivered in a very extra¬ 
ordinary manner into small angular fragments. Scoresby 1 has 
1 Scoresby’s Arctic Regions, vol. i. p. 122. 
