which is a perfect child's puzzle of slabs of different sizes, with 5 or 6 distinct sides to each, all fitted together with the neatness of a honeycomb. I tried in vain to find some system on which it was arranged. We had the good fortune to see a group of guanacos feeding quietly under the old trees. They looked strange enough to be in character with them, having the body of a sheep and the head of a camel; and they let us come quite near. On the other side of the mountains they are used as a beast of burden, though so weak that ten of them could not carry the load of an average donkey. After wandering about the lower lands, we climbed through the bogs and granite boulders to the top of one of the hills, and came suddenly to a most wonderful view, with seven snowy cones of the Cordillera piercing their way through the long line of mist which hid the nearer connecting mountains from sight, and glittering against the greenish blue sky. Each one looked perfectly separate and gigantic, though the highest was only 10,000 feet above the sea. Under the mist were hills of beech forest, and nearer still the Araucaria domes, while the foreground consisted of noble old specimens of the same trees grouped round a huge grey boulder covered with moss and enriched with sprays of embothrium of the brightest scarlet. No subject could have been finer, if I could only have painted it, but that 'if' has been plaguing me for years, and every year seems to take me farther from a satisfactory result."
Inspired by this charming description, and by a desire to see the magnificent forests of Southern Chile, whence I hoped to introduce new trees and plants to our gardens, I visited Chile in the winter of 1901–1902, and after various difficulties caused by the dispute about the frontier, which nearly led to a war between Chile and Argentina, I started from the hospitable home of my friends, Mr. George and Senora Bussey at San Ignacio, to see the Araucarias in the Sierra de Pemehue, a region where they attain their greatest perfection, and which, having only been recently conquered from the Indians, had been described by no scientific traveller; though Senor Moreno has written an excellent account of the Argentine side of the frontier, which I visited later.
The Sierra de Pemehue is a range of mountains lying on the west side of the upper course of the great Bíobio river, and is not, strictly speaking, a part of the Cordillera of the Andes, from which it is separated by that river. The greater part of it is covered with splendid forests, principally composed of beeches, Fagus obliqua and Fagus Dombeyi, and it was near the head-waters of the Renaico river that I first saw what is to me the most striking of all trees hardy in England, and the only Chilean tree which as yet seems to have acclimatised itself thoroughly in this country.
They were growing in scattered groups on the cliffs far above us at an elevation of 3000–4000 feet, and we did not enter the Araucaria forest till we got near the top of the pass, which crossed over a mountain called Chilpa, between the Renaico and the Villacura valleys. Here the trees were growing scattered among Coigue trees (Fagus Dombeyi), and higher up in a forest mainly composed of Niere (Fagus antarctica), many of which were killed by forest fires, which had not, however, destroyed the thick-barked Araucarias, though I saw here but few young trees and no seedlings.
