(royal mountains). At first sight they produce the impression of
a virgin forest of oaks.

The distance from the Ceja to the district properly called the Montana
is very various at different points. In some parts it takes six or
eight days' hard riding; in other directions the traveller may, in the
morning, leave the snow-covered Puna huts, and at sunset, on the
uninhabited margin of the primeval forest, he may taste pine-apples
and bananas of his own gathering. Such a day certainly deserves to
form an epoch in his life; for in the course of a few hours he passes
through the most opposite climates of the earth, and the gradual
progression of the development of the vegetable world is spread out in
visible reality before him.

The Montanas of Peru are, in general, but thinly peopled with Christian
Indians. They are employed either in cultivating their own fields, or in
working as day-laborers in the great plantations. The productions of the
haciendas consist chiefly of sugar, coffee, maize, coca, tobacco,
oranges, bananas, and pine-apples, which are sent to the Sierra. The
cultivation of bark, balsams, gums, honey and wax, also occupies a
great number of Indians.

The plantation buildings stand on rising grounds. The walls are
constructed of reeds, the interstices being filled up with loam, and the
roofs are of straw or palm leaves. Around the buildings are the fields
allotted to cultivation, in which the soils favorable to the production
of certain plants are selected. The coffee usually grows round the
house, and an adjacent building contains the store-rooms. The
fruit-trees grow along the margins of the maize fields; marshy ground
is selected for the sugar fields; in the vicinity of brooks and
streams the useful banana flourishes; the pine-trees are ranged in
rows on the hot, dry declivities, and the coca is found to thrive best
in warm, hollow dells.

As the humidity of the atmosphere, added to the multitudes of insects,
mice and rats, prevents any lengthened preservation of provisions, the
cultivators sell or exchange them as speedily as possible; hence arises
a very active intercourse in business between the Montanas and the
Sierra. The mountain Indians bring llamas, dried meat, potatoes, bark,
and salt, to exchange for fruit; it is very seldom that any money
circulates in this traffic. Only the owners of plantations sell their
productions for ready money, with which they purchase, in the upland
towns, Europea