Page:The Present State of Peru.djvu/43

Rh Europe, she aimed at assembling together in Peru all the productions she had denied to the other three quarters, to repose there majestically, surrounded by each of them. Such and so great are the riches this admirable kingdom contains! In describing its physical geography, it will not be inexpedient to adopt certain divisions. We shall, in the first place, treat of the general design of the two worlds which compose the two principal parts of Peru; of those two worlds which form the august temple of our mother and liberal benefactress. Their limits, their directions, their correspondences; their respective advantages over the rest of the terraqueous globe; and their preponderance and influx in the equilibrium of that globe, are objects which, presenting themselves on a large scale, will lead and accustom us, without fatigue, to the detailed examination of whatever each of them in particular contains. O that any one could possess the divine and energetic pencil of Nature, to give to his portraits the colouring and delicacy with which she has beautified the original!

Peru, the limits of which are traced out by the great phenomena that divide the provinces of its universal empire, forms, without doubt, the whole of the southern part of the Burning Zone, which runs north and south from the Equator to the Tropic of Capricorn, and west and east from the borders of the Pacific Sea to the forests and deserts of the country of the Amazons, by which the eastern branch of the Cordillera of the Andes is terminated. Thus its greatest extension, which is to be measured in degrees of latitude, embraces a space of twenty-three degrees and a half, between Cape Palma on the confines of Pasto, and Morro-Moreno on those of the kingdom of Chile. Chosen to be the throne of light in the thern