One writer says: “The sight that met my gaze was an astounding one. An immense glacier separated us from the glacier below—the difference between twenty-three thousand feet and thirteen thousand feet. It was a precipice of gigantic size. As I looked down its dizzy sides, I saw spurs of the mountain flanking the glaciers beneath to the left and right, giving the appearance of some huge amphitheatre. The sun was low in the heavens, and did not penetrate into the vast pit, and the great masses of vapour slowly moving about in it far below, gave it the aspect of a giant cauldron, into whose depths the eye failed to penetrate, two miles vertically below. The arete, about five feet wide at this point, ran east to the summit and west to the snow-clad western peak of the mountain, growing ever narrower in that direction, until, where it sloped up to the highest point, its edge became knife-like.” In “The Highest Andes,” by E. A. Fitzgerald, the following description is given of the summit of Aconcagua. “Over Argentinian territory range beyond range stretched away; coloured slopes of red, brown and yellow, peaks and crags capped with fresh-fallen snow. I had hoped to look down upon the pampas of Argentina. In this I was disappointed for, though I gazed down over the range, a sea of mountains some sixty miles in width, and averaging a height of quite thirteen thousand feet, made such a view impossible. Away over the surging mass of white cloud that lay on the glacier at my feet rose the southern frontier chain. Torlosa and the Twins, on either side of the Cumbre Pass, stood like colossal sentinels guarding the great highway between the two republics; then there were the lofty glaciers lying between the rugged crags of Juncal, the ice peaks of Navarro and Pollera, the Leones and the Cerro del Plomo, that overhangs the city of Santiago, Chile, and some sixty miles farther on the magnificent white summit of Tupungato. “No lens or pen can depict the view from the Chilean side. I looked down the great waste, past the western peak of the mountain to right and left, over ranges that dwindled in height as they neared the coast to where, a hundred miles away, the blue expanse of the Pacific glittered in the evening sun. The sun lay low on the horizon, and the whole surface of the ocean within the points of vision was diffused with a blood-red glow. The shimmering of the light on the water could be distinctly seen. So near did it seem that I could not realize the immense distance that separated one from it.