Has this great Cordillera produced a high type of humanity? Has the clear atmosphere, the nearer approach to the clouds, the purity and example of the heights made man here pure and noble? We shall judge later, after viewing the palimpsest of history here, following on the palimpsest of Nature, for the Cordillera is a scroll of time, erased, rewritten in the physical and in the human world. The Andes have been blood-stained along all their four-thousand-mile course, that we know, ever since the white man trod them. We also know that before his time the Cordillera did produce a high human culture, that of the mysterious "Andine people," with their successors, the Incas. Pagan, perhaps, but who, in the long ages, had evolved some comprehension of the "Unknown God," and whose social code was more in tune with a true economic philosophy of life than that of their successors. Descending now from the clouds, metaphorically and actually, we must glance more particularly at the life of those modern countries which have in part their home in the Cordillera, to whom the Cordillera is a very real and palpable thing. From north to south, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile occupy this extensive zone: countries whose general conditions as regards the littoral we have seen in our journey along the Pacific coast. Excepting Bolivia, all these lands have the advantages accruing from the condition that they stretch from the coast across the Andes, extending to the Amazon plains beyond; thus enjoying zones respectively of coast, mountain and forest, with all their diversity of environment, climate and resource. As we shall see in the chapter devoted to the Amazon Valley, many navigable streams traverse this forested region, giving access by launch or canoe through thousands of miles of otherwise inaccessible territory, for roads are often impossible and of railways there are none. Colombia we shall visit in another chapter. Both Colombia and Venezuela lie in part upon the Andes and face upon the Spanish Main. Ecuador is but a small country in comparison with the vaster areas of its neighbours, but Nature has rendered it extremely diverse, and has dowered it--it is a terrible gift, however--with some of the most remarkable mountain forms on the face of the globe. Nothing can exceed the stupendous grandeur of the great "avenue" of snow-clad volcanoes which arises before us around Quito and terminates on the Equator.