The Andes [antikvár]

1/ Into the Mountains Never had I seen mountains like these, and I was crushed by the grandeur—speechless with the overpowering wonder of it. col. p. h. fawcett/ exploration fawcett The Andes are great humblers of men, and even of other mountains. They stretch the length of South America, forming a crenellated wall 4,500 miles long, draped at the northern end with vegetation, and at the southern end with ice and snow. Only the Himalayas and Pamirs of Asia boast peaks that are higher. Mount McKinley, at 20,300 feet, is the tallest mountain in North America; more than a dozen Andean peaks are taller. And down the length of this range, and on its slopes, he wild regions of snow, ice and fire, of dripping jungle and seared desert, of cloud cover and merciless sun, of intense heat and killing cold, of warm moist air and air so thin that breathing is painful. Where, I wondered, studying my maps of South America, shouldl start? I made up my mind: I would begin where, for all intents and purposes, the Andes themselves begin, in northern Colombia, close to the shores of the Caribbean, and journey down them, travelling by car, truck, aeroplane and on foot, to where they end within 700 miles of Antarctica. Thus it was that I and my wife Marion—whom I had met in South America several years before—found ourselves on the humid shore of the Caribbean, looking ahead into the mist in an anxious search for the mountains that we had come to see. It was only 6 a.m. and just light. We were on a narrow beach just outside the village of Palomino. Waves broke behind us and spread out in a lace of foam on the white sand. The air had that refreshing chill that only a cool morning in the tropics can