Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/162



" spoils my sleep is not the strength of the enemy, but how to pass those immense mountains," said San Martin, as from Mendoza he gazed upon the snow-clad summits of the Andes, which as a mighty barrier separate the wide plains of the Argentine Pampa from the smiling valleys of Chili, through twenty-two degrees of latitude, from the desert of Atacama to Cape Horn.

These mountains at 33° south latitude divide into two parallel ranges, one running southward along the borders of the Pacific Ocean, the other forming the grand Cordillera upon which San Martin gazed from Mendoza. The coast range is a succession of granite hills with rounded summits and gentle slopes, like to the waves of a petrified sea. The great Cordillera is in its centre composed of three or four ranges of conical and sharply-defined peaks which rise one over the other to a height of 21,000 feet above the level of the sea, crowned with perpetual snow. At its feet lie deep valleys, from which perpendicular precipices rise up to the clouds, and the mighty condors wheeling in airy circles at that dizzy height are the only living things to be seen. There are also lakes fed by torrents of melted snow which, pouring down the mountain sides into these valleys, find at times no exit, their path being closed by immense heaps of debris hurled from the lofty summits by the force of ice