CHAPTER VII - MISSIONS OF THE CHAYMAS

Summary

On the 4th of September, at an early hour, our travellers commenced an excursion to the missionary stations of the Chayma Indians, and to the lofty mountains which traverse New Andalusia. The morning was deliriously cool; and from the summit of the hill of San Francisco they enjoyed in the short twilight an extensive view of the sea, the adjacent plain, and the distant peaks. After walking two hours they arrived at the foot of the chain, where they found different rocks, together with a new and more luxuriant vegetation. They observed that the latter was more brilliant wherever the limestone was covered by a quartzy sandstone,—a circumstance which probably depends not so much on the nature of the soil as on its greater humidity; the thin layers of slate-clay which the latter contains preventing the water from filtering into the crevices of the former. In those moist places they always discovered appearances of cultivation, huts inhabited by mestizoes, and placed in the centre of small enclosures, containing papaws, plantains, sugar-canes, and maize. In Europe, the wheat, barley, and other kinds of grain, cover vast spaces of ground, and, in general, wherever the inhabitants live upon corn, the cultivated lands are not separated from each other by the intervention of large wastes; but in the torrid zone, where the fertility of the soil is proportionate to the heat and humidity of the air, and where man has appropriated plants that yield earlier and more abundant crops, an immense population finds ample subsistence on a narrow space.