Magellan, the intrepid Portuguese navigator of early times, whose name the Strait bears, bore bravely out into the great south sea which he named the Pacific. His crew were weak with cold and hunger. But he would push on, "even if they had to eat the leather of the rigging." Ox-hides, rats and sawdust, indeed, they did eat. On to the west the vessels sailed, across the unknown sea--"almost beyond the grasp of man for vastness"--to circumnavigate the globe for home. Magellan himself did not finish the voyage, although he crossed the Pacific, for his earthly race was run; he left his bones in the Philippines. But the ship and his pilot, Sebastian del Cano, a Spaniard, reached home, and Cano was given the arms of nobility, with the device of a ship and globe and the inscription _Tu Solus circumdedesti me_. * * * * * From the Pacific coast we shall now ascend to the great chain of the Andes, to follow the same series of countries in that high region. CHAPTER VII THE CORDILLERA OF THE ANDES IN ECUADOR, PERU AND BOLIVIA Siste, viator; draw rein: your mule will stop willingly; he is stricken with _soroche_ perhaps, the malady of the mountain, which you yourself may suffer if at this elevation, where but half an atmosphere presses upon us and oxygen is scant, you attempt to run or climb. Draw rein upon this summit and look beyond. There is a panorama it were worth a journey over a hemisphere to see. Range and peak are clothed with perpetual snow, which gleams like porcelain in the sun. Heavenward thrown, crumpled, folded, ridged and fractured, with gnomon-fashioned uplifts pointing to the sky, shattered strata and sheer crevasse, natural terrace and grim escarpment, hung over with filmy mist-veils and robed with the white clothing of its snowfields, and, when the windows of heaven are open, drenched with the deluges intercepted from the boundless plains and forests far beyond; the father of the rivers whose floods are borne a thousand leagues away the Cordillera crouches, rears and groans upon the western seaboard of the continent. The beautiful Andes, the terrible Andes, the life-giving Andes, the death-dealing Andes--so we might apostrophize them--for the Cordillera is of many moods, and whatever change of adjectives the traveller may ring, he will fail of truly describing this mighty chain. When the delicate tints of early morning shine on the crested snow in rarest beauty, and the light and tonic air invigorates both man and horse, the leagues pass swiftly by. Night falls, or the snow-cloud gathers, or the pelting rain descends; then does the weight of weariness and melancholy descend upon us[23]--so have I felt it. [23] The Author's _The Andes and the Amazon_.