Page:A history of Chile.djvu/44

 cloak; the men wore woolen ponchos, also of greenish color, shirt, vest, breeches, bandages of wool around their heads and, those of the higher classes, woolen boots or sandals.

Such were the people dwelling in the fertile valleys of Chile, when Almagro and his little army descended from the mountains and astonished them with their prancing war horses, glittering armor, flashing weapons and thundering guns. The Spanish chroniclers say they found the valleys filled with inhabitants, and doubtless the population then was not so far below the rural population of Chile at the present day. Here was a country densely populated, with valleys as fertile as any under the skies, with an ocean front of nearly 2500 miles, an average "breadth of 140 miles, covering over 300,000 square miles stretching from the desert of Atacama to the Straits of Magellan, watered by more than 100 rivers of considerable size, enwalled by the towering Andes where fourteen volcanoes belched smoke constantly and others occasionally, and protected against invasion from the north by three hundred miles of treeless, verdureless desert. Here was as favored a land, that the veteran Almagro looked down upon from the Andean passes, as the land flowing with milk and honey which the storied one of old beheld from "Nebo's lonely mountain." Here was a climate quite as salubrious as that of Italy or California, where thunder storms are unknown, rains gentle and winds attuned to an Eolian pitch; where in many districts, the hills are verdant and the valleys and plains covered with crops and fruitage and carpeted with flowers; where the bowels of the earth are full of metals, both precious and useful.

Coming down from the mountains into these valleys, feasting their eyes upon this verdant landscape, upon