And eat, and sing, and dance away their time, Fresh as their groves, and happy as their clime.[17]
General features of the Sierra.—Roads.—Wilds of San Mateo.—Indian’s eyrie.—Mountain curate.—Enterprise of a priest engaged in inland traffic.—Pastoral life of Indians.—Ancient ruins.—Royal road of the Incas.—Tarma, a pretty Sierra town, or pueblo.—Various sorts of bridges.—Balsa, or canoe of rushes.—Ancient aqueducts and terraced gardens of the aborigines.—Pagan edifices among the rocks near the coast.—Vale of Rimac.—Temples of the ancient Sun-worshippers of the land.
The space enclosed between the gigantic ridges of the eastern and western Cordillera, or great and frigid mountain-chains of the Andes, is occupied by numerous table-lands yielding short fine grass, and extensive hilly pasture-ground, very like in general outline to the Highlands of Scotland, though destitute of heath: and over this very uneven surface are interspersed lagoons and rivers, and deep, warm, agricultural valleys, in the bottom of which grow the richest fruits and produce of the coast; while the summits of the hills, that rise from and enclose these fertile dales, are exposed to the violence of the tempest in the elevated regions of cold and barrenness.
From one of these glens, where we once resided for some time, we left a house at the door of which the lemon-tree was in perpetual fruit and blossom, and, in two or three hours thereafter, arrived at the rugged crags and peaks of the eastern Cordillera.
The lines of road from the western coast to the central Andes of Peru wind along narrow glens, sometimes contracting into mere ravines, edged by lofty hills or prodigious rocks that close in abruptly. The traveller thus journeys for days, leaving one hill behind, and meeting another rising before; but never arrives at that ideal spot, whence he may command a view from sea to sea,
“Where Andes, giant of the western star, Looks from his throne of clouds o’er half the world.”
The highest mountains in Britain, such as Ben-Nevis or Cruachan,[18] must appear very diminutive, when compared to the Andes, whose very vastness and extent preclude from the inland regions any view of the sun dipping under the waves of the Pacific, and whose magnitude limits the quickest sight to the groups of mountains, with their included dales, that go to form one stupendous pile of varied shape, production, and climate.