Chapter II
A Desert Journey
If the high and bold coast of northern Chile excites the imagination in these times, what must it have seemed to the sea voyagers of the sixteenth century, the hulls of whose tiny caravels would find ample room in a single smokestack of either the Leviathan or the Majestic! The so-called ports of northern Chile are either open roadsteads or occupy mere shallow bights in this forbidding coast, and the towns stand upon narrow marine terraces cut in a past age and now up- lifted to form a narrow shelf that furnishes barely room enough for a settlement. In places two or three thousand feet of steep scarp, as barren apparently as if no rain ever fell, shut off all view of the distant mountains. There are no openings here and there where green valleys lie floored with cultivated fields as on the coast of Peru. It is a simpler coast than that farther north and far more desertic in aspect. The streams disappear for the most part in inland basins, and the coast is almost entirely without a touch of green. Except for one river, the Loa, there is not a single stream that reaches the sea in the 600 miles of territory from Arica to the mouth of the Copiapé River. There are dry arroyos that nick the great western scarp of the coastal desert, but they carry water only in times of highly exceptional rain separated by ten or fifteen and in some cases fifty years of drought.
The Desert Landscape
There is in northern Chile none of the scenic beauty that marks the change from bleak mountains to the warm, green valleys of the coastal desert of Peru. In the latter case the streams reach the sea, and the valley walls enclose cultivated fields that fill the valley floor. In Peru the picture is generally
touched with color—a yellow, haze-covered horizon on the
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