t," burst suddenly into view over
the peaks of the Andes.

[Footnote 9: _Cordillera_ (pronounced Cor-de-yer-ra), literally a long
ridge, is usually applied to a longitudinal subdivision of the Andes, as
the east and west cordilleras inclosing the valley of Quito; _Sierra_
(from the Spanish for saw or Arabic _sehrah_, an uncultivated tract) is
a jagged spur of the Andes; _Cerro_, "a hog-backed hill." _Paramo_ (a
desert) is the treeless, uninhabited, uncultivated rolling steppes just
below the snow-limit.]

Bidding "adios" to our Guayaquilian friends, we took passage in one of
Captain Lee's little steamers to Bodegas, seventy miles up the river.
The Ecuadorian government, strange to say, does not patronize these
steamers, but carries the Quito mail in a canoe. The Guayas is a
sluggish stream, its turbid waters starting from the slope of the
Andes, and flowing through a low, level tract, covered with varied forms
of vegetable life. Forests of the broad-leaved plantain and banana line
the banks. The fruit is the most common article of food in equatorial
America, and is eaten raw, roasted, baked, boiled, and fried. It grows
on a succulent stem formed of sheath-like leaf-stalks rolled over one
another, and terminating in enormous light green, glossy blades nearly
ten feet long by two feet wide, so delicate that the slightest wind will
tear them transversely. Each tree (vulgarly called "the tree of
paradise") produces fruit but once, and then dies. A single bunch often
weighs 60 or 70 pounds; and Humboldt calculated that 33 pounds of wheat
and 99 pounds of potatoes require the same space of ground as will
produce 4000 pounds of bananas. They really save more labor than steam,
giving the greatest amount of food from a given piece of ground with the
least labor. They are always found where the palm is; but their original
home is the foot of the Himalayas. The banana (by some botanists
considered a different species from the plantain) is about four inches
long, and cylindrical, and is eaten raw. The plantain is twice as large
and prismatic, and uncooked is unhealthy. There is another variety,
_platanos de Otaheite_, which resembles the banana in size and quality,
but is prismatic.

A belt of jungle and impenetrable brushwood intervenes, and then cacao
and coffee plantations, vast in extent, arrest the eye. Passing these,
the steamer brings you alongside of broad fields covered with the low,
prickly pine-apple plant; the air is