The Courts of the Morning by John Buchan

The Gran Seco has not often appeared in the world's literature. Francisco de Toledo first entered it in the sixteenth century, but after that there is no mention of it till Calamity Brown wandered thither from the coast in the late years of the eighteenth. That luckless and probably mendacious mariner has little good to say of it; it was the abode of devilish insects and devilish men, and, if we are to believe him, he barely escaped with his life. In the nineteenth century it was partially explored by the Spanish naturalist, Mendoza, and a Smithsonian expedition investigated its peculiar geology. Its later history is written in the reports of its copper companies, but Sylvester Perry visited it in his celebrated journey round the globe, and it has a short and comminatory chapter in his Seeing Eyes. Mr. Perry did not like the place, and in his characteristic way has likened it to a half-healed abscess, sloughed over with unwholesome skin.

Mr. Perry was partially right. The Gran Seco is not built to the scale of man and it has no care for his comforts. But it has its own magnificence. Its gate is the town of Santa Ana, in whose marketplace stands the colossal figure of the crucified Christ, first erected by Pizarro, many times destroyed by earthquakes, and always replaced, since it is the defiance of the plains to the mountains. But the gate is far from the citadel, for the avenue is a hundred miles long. The Gran Seco railway, now a double line most skilfully engineered, and wholly controlled by the Company, runs first up a long valley where only in midwinter a river flows. Then it passes over tiers of high desert, sinks into hollows where sometimes there are waters and forests, climbs again in tortuous gullies, till at length it emerges upon the great plateau; and always beside it can be traced the old highroad where once rode Toledo's men-at-arms, and only the other day the ore from the mines jolted down-country on mule-back. But there are still many miles to go before the city of Gran Seco is reached, sunk in a shallow trough among its barren and blistered hills.