Read "The Smuggler Chief" by Gustave Aimard online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The traveller who, proceeding south, leaves one fine morning the city of Santiago, that magnificent capital of Chili which is destined ere long (if it be not destroyed by an earthquake, as has already happened twice), to become the finest city of South America, experiences -- according as he belongs to one of the two classes of travellers called by Sterne positive or enthusiastic travellers -- a sudden disillusion or a complete charm at the sight of the landscape spread out before him.
In fact, for a radius of fifty or sixty leagues round the capital, the country offers, with but few differences, the same appearance as we meet with when we traverse the smiling plains of Beauce, or the delicious province of Touraine, so poetically named the garden of France.