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.
20th.--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 dykes,--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 extraordinary manner into small
angular fragments. Scoresby [1] has observed the same fact in
Spitzbergen. The case appears to me rather obscure: for that part of
the mountain which is protected by a mantle of snow, must be less
subject to repeated and great changes of temperature than any other
part. I have sometimes thought, that the earth and fragments of stone
on the surface, were perhaps less effectually removed by slowly
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