Description
Coloured etching by C. Empson, 1836.
"This sketch was taken from the corridor of a cottage built on the eastern slope of the Andes. Travellers, to whom almost every portion of the globe is familiar, have acknowledged, while gazing upon this spot, that they never beheld such a sublime spectacle. The real foreground of this splendid panorama could not be represented by the pencil: the dark ravine into which you look, is beautiful beyond conception, extending to the very base of the snow-clad Cordilleras. There grew the graceful palm, with its plume-like foliage, groves of bamboo, tree ferns, magnolias, acacias, cedars, and, towering above all, the mighty almendron with its smooth silvery stem, straight and round as a Tuscan column, bearing aloft its noble clusters of pure white blossoms contrasting with the dark, dense foliage of its widely-spreading branches. A rapid, clear, and musical river, supplied by the gradual dissolution of the everlasting snow, under a cloudless sun, produced a diurnal and perceptible increase of the mountain torrent, which sometimes fell in cascades, and sometimes, impeded by huge blocks of granite, expanded into broad lakes, and again, finding an uninterrupted channel, rolled onward beyond the scope of human vision. " (Empson. loc. cit.)
Inscription: Rustic corridor Third narrative
Image Licence
CC BY 4.0
Image Credit
image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London
Location
Ibague, Tolima, Colombia
Country
Colombia
Medium
Print
Tags
Category
Landscapes & Seascapes
TWW Comment
See two accounts by David Zuck : https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/HistAnaesthSoc_and_SectAnaesthRoyalSocMed_6March1993.pdf and http://www.histansoc.org.uk/uploads/9/5/5/2/9552670/volume_12.pdf, p 56
