Around us, Tierra del Fuego, on the road just north of Ushuaia, almost at the terminus of the Pan American highway, we are near the end of the mighty Andes Range. The mountains are relatively low here, perhaps 4,000 feet rather than the 25,000 where Chile and Argentina continue to abut about a thousand miles to the north. They are still majestic, but with their sharp glacial features, they appear to be more than just a little sinister-steep, stark, dark, knife-edged, very nearly threatening. The floor of the broad, glacier-cut valley is filled with silt, rock crushed to powder by an unimaginable weight of crystalline water endlessly scraping, abrading as it slowly flowed to the sea. The ground is waterlogged, a muddy clay overtopped by a thick, rootless carpet of sphagnum moss--generation after generation growing one atop the other. Underfoot, the land feels alive: soft, giving, and quivering. On its edges, at the foot of the mountains, in the drier, more massive debris left by countless landslides, there grows a forest. The trees look to be some sort of conifer, but no look closer at the leaves, the forest is composed of two species of southern beech, members of the oak family, convergent in form with evergreens of northern climes. And on almost every tree, above our heads, there sprout balls of orange mushrooms from woody, gnarled knots, Indian bread, useful to people as its name implies. Strange, exotic, but oh, so fascinating, and yes, certainly beautiful. And these are but our earliest impressions in a day spent exploring the natural charms of the uttermost lands of the last continent before Antarctica!