Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

192 NOTES OF A BOTANIST CHAP. x,x
de Sanancajas), which stretches along the eastern
base of the mountain for about 8 miles, and at a
height of 1 1,000 to 12,000 feet. Here the icy cope
of Chimborazo seemed so near that one might have
touched it by stretching out the hand an illusion
caused by the transparency of the atmosphere.
The temperature was pleasant, for the bright sun
tempered the cool breeze, and there was no sand.
But as I returned, a few weeks afterwards, I
crossed the paramo in a piercingly cold misty
rain, and when I reached Mocha I scarcely knew
whether I had any hands or feet. If you have
been up Teesdale as far as the Weel, you have
seen in that chilly treeless solitude something very
like the paramos of the Andes. The Weel itself
is not unlike the small lagoons scattered about in
hollows on Sanancajas. They are often to be
seen covered with small wild-ducks that no one
cares to disturb. Herds of shaggy wild cattle
roam over the paramo, and pick up a scanty sub-
sistence from the sedgy herbage.
You may have read of the paramero - - the
deadly-cold wind, charged with frost, that sometimes
living
blows over the
thing
paramos, and withers every
it meets. A person has told me that
when a boy he was once crossing the highest point
of Sanancajas, towards Guayaquil, along with his
father, when they saw a man sitting by the wayside
and apparently grmning at them with all his might.
" See," said the boy, "how that man is laughing at
us!" "Silence, my son," replied the father, "or
say a prayer for the repose of his soul the man
is dead !
'
I have had to face a paramero, but never of this