The Smuggler Chief by Gustave Aimard

The Cordilleras of the Andes are strange mountains, with which no others in the world could be compared, and they form, so to speak, the backbone of the New World, the entire length of which they traverse. It is in Chili, whose natural frontier they form, that they assume the sternest and most gloomy proportions; raising to the clouds their snow-covered heads, it seems as if it were under the pressure of an omnipotent will, as Ervilla, the poet of Araucania, says, that they allow at certain periods daring travellers to enter their dark gorges and cross their denuded peaks.

The Cordilleras cannot at any season be everywhere crossed, and it is only during four months at the most that at certain spots caravans are enabled to make their way through the snow, escalade the crests of these inhospitable mountains, and descend the opposite sides.