XVI 
SEA-WORN VALLEYS 
379 
carriage 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. 
June 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- 
