THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

GIFT OF

J. Lorenz Sporer

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

W. H. HUDSON

Author of "Idle Days in Patagonia," " The Purple
Land," "A Crystal Age," Etc.

IDLE DAYS IN
PATAGONIA

BY

W. H. HUDSON

AUTHOR or "THE PUBPLE LAND," "A CRYSTAL AQE,'
"A SHEPHERD'S LIFE," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
ALFRED HARTLEY AOT J. SMIT

NEW YORK

E. P. BUTTON <fc CO,

681 FIFTH AVENUE

PUBLISHED 1917,

BY
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

$rtntrt in tfjt «nitrt fetatefi of Smttfca

College
Library

PR

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

PAGE

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! ....... 1

CHAPTER II.

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER ...... 18

CHAPTER III.
VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER ..... 31

CHAPTER IV.

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY ...... 42

CHAPTER V.
A DOG IN EXILE ....... 57

CHAPTER VI.

THE WAR WITH NATURE ...... 72

CHAPTER VII.
LIFE IN PATAGONIA ....... 91

CHAPTER VIII.

SNOW, AND THE QUALITY OF WHITENESS . . . 108

CHAPTER IX.
IDLE DAYS . . 121

vi CONTENTS

CHAPTER X.

PAGE

BIRD Music IN SOUTH AMERICA 140

CHAPTER XI.
SIGHT IN SAVAGES 158

CHAPTER XII.
CONCERNING EYES 179

CHAPTER XIII.
THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 201

CHAPTER XIV.
THE PERFUME OF AN EVENING PRIMROSE 229

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Portrait of Author Frontispiece

PAGE

At last, Patagonia! .......

Chafiar trees ........

Serpent with a Cross .......

Swallows congregating .......

An Indian burial-place ......

The river by moonlight ......

Snow at El Carmen .......

Black vulture ........

Cow and pigs ........

Major and the flamingo ......

Upland geese ........

Damian gives himself up ......

Damian's wife ........

Ctenomys magellanica .......

Calodromus elegans .......

Dolichotes patagonica .......

Calandria mocking-bird

Cyphorhinus cantans .......

Gaucho with spectacles ......

Viewing a distant object ......

Magellanic eagle owl .......

The Plains of Patagonia

Wakening at dawn .......

The evening primrose .......

vii

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

IDLE DAYS IN
PATAGONIA

CHAPTER I
AT LAST, PATAGONIA!

HPHE wind had blown a gale all night, and I had
-*• been hourly expecting that the tumbling,
storm-vexed old steamer, in which I had taken
passage to the Eio Negro, would turn over once
for all and settle down beneath that tremendous
tumult of waters. For the groaning sound of its
straining timbers, and the engine throbbing like
an overtasked human heart, had made the ship
seem a living thing to me ; and it was tired of the
struggle, and under the tumult was peace. But
at about three o'clock in the morning the wind
began to moderate, and, taking off coat and boots,
I threw myself into my bunk for a little sleep.

Ours, it must be said, w^as a very curious boat,
reported ancient and much damaged; long and
narrow in shape, like a Viking's ship, with the
passengers' cabins ranged like a row of small
wooden cottages on the deck: it was as ugly to
look at as it was said to be unsafe to voyage in.

i

2 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

To make matters worse our captain, a man over
eighty years old, was lying in his cabin sick unto
death, for, as a fact, he died not many days after
our mishap; our one mate was asleep, leaving
only the men to navigate the steamer on that
perilous coast, and in the darkest hour of a tem-
pestuous night.

I was just dropping into a doze when a succes-
sion of bumps, accompanied by strange grating
and grinding noises, and shuddering motions of
the ship, caused me to start up again and rush to
the cabin door. The night was still black and
starless, with wind and rain, but for acres round
us the sea was whiter than milk. I did not step
out ; close to me, half-way between my cabin door
and the bulwarks, where our only boat was fas-
tened, three of the sailors were standing together
talking in low tones. "We are lost," I heard one
say; and another answer, "Aye, lost for ever!"
Just then the mate, roused from sleep, came run-
ning to them. "Good God, what have you done
with the steamer!" he exclaimed sharply; then,
dropping his voice, he added, "Lower the boat-
quick ! ' '

I crept out and stood, unseen by them in the
obscurity, within five feet of the group. Not a
thought of the dastardly character of the act they
were about to engage in — for it was their inten-
tion to save themselves and leave us to our fate-
entered my mind at the time. My only thought
was that at the last moment, when they would be

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 3

unable to prevent it except by knocking me sense-
less, I would spring with them into the boat and
save myself, or else perish with them in that
awful white surf. But one other person, more
experienced than myself, and whose courage took
another and better form, was also near and lis-
tening. He was the first engineer — a young Eng-
lishman from Newcastle-on-Tyne. Seeing the
men making for the boat, he slipped out of the
engine-room, revolver in hand, and secretly fol-
lowed them; and when the mate gave that order,
he stepped forward with the weapon raised, and
said in a quiet but determined voice that he would
ishoot the first man who should attempt to obey
it. The men slunk away and disappeared in the
gloom. In a few moments more the passengers
began streaming out on to the deck in a great state
of alarm; last of all the old captain, white and
hollow-eyed from his death-bed, appeared like a
ghost among us. He had not been long standing
there, with arms folded on his chest, issuing no
word of command, and paying no attention to
the agitated questions addressed to him by the
passengers, when, by some lucky chance, the
steamer got off the rocks and plunged on for a
space through the seething, milky surf ;. then, very
suddenly, passed out of it into black and com-
paratively calm water. For ten or twelve minutes
she sped rapidly and smoothly on; then it was
said that she had ceased to move, that we were
stuck fast in the sand of the shore, although no

4 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

shore was visible in the intense darkness, and to
m6 it seemed that we were still moving swiftly on.

There was no longer any wind, and through the
now fast-breaking clouds ahead of us appeared
the first welcome signs of dawn. By degrees the
darkness grew less intense ; only just ahead of us
there still remained something black and un-
changeable— a portion, as it were, of that pitchy
gloom that a short time before had made sea and
air appear one and indistinguishable; but as the
light increased it changed not, and at last it was
seen to be a range of low hills or dunes of sand
scarcely a stone's throw from the ship's bows.
It was true enough that we were stuck fast in the
sand; and although this was a safer bed for the
steamer than the jagged rocks, the position was
still a perilous one, and I at once determined to
land. Three other passengers resolved to bear me
company; and as the tide had now gone out, a^d
the water at the bows was barely waist deep, we
were lowered by means of ropes into the sea, and
quickly waded to the shore.

We were not long in scrambling up the dunes
to get a sight of the country beyond. At last, Pat-
agonia! How often had I pictured in imagina-
tion, wishing with an intense longing to visit this
solitary wilderness, resting far off in its primitive
and desolate peace, untouched by man, remote
from civilization! There it lay full in sight be-
fore me — the unmarred desert that wakes strange
feelings in us; the ancient habitation of giants,

AT LAST, FATAGOXIA!

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 5

whose footprints seen on the sea-shore amazed
Magellan and his men, and won for it the name
of Patagonia. There, too, far away in the in-
terior, was the place called Trapalanda, and the
spirit-guarded lake, on whose margin rose the
battlements of that mysterious city, which many
have sought and none have found.

It was not, however, the fascination of old
legends that drew me, nor the desire of the desert,
for not until I had seen it, and had tasted its
flavor, then, and on many subsequent occasions,
did I know how much its solitude and desolation
would be to me, what strange knowledge it would
teach, and how enduring its effect would be on
my spirit. Not these things, but the passion of
the ornithologist took me. Many of the winged
wanderers with which I had been familiar from
childhood in La Plata were visitors, occasional or
regular, from this gray wilderness of thorns. In
some cases they were passengers, seen only when
they stooped to rest their wings, or heard far off
1 1 wailing their way from cloud to cloud, ' ' impelled
by that mysterious thought -baffling faculty, so un-
like all other phenomena in its manifestations as
to give it among natural things something of the
supernatural. Some of these wanderers, more es-
pecially such as possess only a partial or limited
migration, I hoped to meet again in Patagonia,
singing their summer songs, and breeding in their
summer haunts. It was also my hope to find some
new species, some bird as beautiful, let us say, as

6 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

the wryneck or wheatear, and as old on the earth,
but which had never been named and never ever
seen by any appreciative human eye. I do not
know how it is with other ornithologists at the
time when their enthusiasm is greatest ; of myself
I can say that my dreams by night were often of
some new bird, vividly seen; and such dreams
were always beautiful to me, and a grief to wake
from ; yet the dream-bird often as not appeared in
a modest gray coloring, or plain brown, or some
other equally sober tint.

From the summit of the sandy ridge we saw
before us an undulating plain, bounded only by
the horizon, carpeted with short grass, seared by
the summer suns, and sparsely dotted over with a
few somber-leafed bushes. It was a desert that
had been a desert always, and for that very reason
sweet beyond all scenes to look upon, its ancient
quiet broken only by the occasional call or twitter
of some small bird, while the morning air I inhaled
was made delicious with a faint familiar perfume.
Casting my eyes down I perceived, growing in
the sand at my feet, an evening primrose plant,
with at least a score of open blossoms on its low
wide-spreading branches; and this, my favorite
flower, both in gardens and growing wild, was the
sweet perfumer of the wilderness! Its subtle
fragrance, first and last, has been much to me,
and has followed me from the New World to the
Old, to serve sometimes as a kind of second more
faithful memory, and to set my brains working on

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 7

a pretty problem, to which I shall devote a chapter
at the end of this book.

Our survey concluded, we set out in the direc-
tion of the Rio Negro. Before quitting the
steamer the captain had spoken a few words to us.
Looking at us as though he saw us not, he said
that the ship had gone ashore somewhere north of
the Eio Negro, about thirty miles he thought, and
that we should doubtless find some herdsmen's
huts on our way thither. No need then to burden
ourselves with food and drink! At first we kept
close to the dunes that bordered the seashore, wad-
ing through a luxuriant growth of wild liquorice
— a pretty plant about eighteen inches high, with
deep green feathery foliage crowned with spikes
of pale blue flowers. Some of the roots which
we pulled up from the loose sandy soil were over
nine feet in length. All the apothecaries in the
world might have laid in a few years' supply
of the drug from the plants we saw on that morn-
ing.

To my mind there is nothing in life so delightful
as that feeling of relief, of escape, and absolute
freedom which one experiences in a vast solitude,
where man has perhaps never been, and has, at
any rate, left no trace of his existence. It was
strong and exhilarating in me on that morning;
and I was therefore by no means elated when we
descried, some distance ahead, the low walls of
half a dozen mud cabins. My fellow-travelers
were, however, delighted at the discovery, and we

8 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

hastened on, thinking that we were nearer to the
settlement than we had supposed. But we found
the huts uninhabited, the doors broken down, the
wells choked up and overgrown with wild liquorice
plants.

We learnt subsequently that a few venturesome
herdsmen had made their home in this remote spot
with their families, and that about a year before
our visit the Indians had swept down on them and
destroyed the young settlement. Very soon we
turned our backs on the ruined hovels, my com-
panions loudly expressing their disappointment,
while I felt secretly glad that we were yet to
drink a little more deeply of the cup of wild na-
ture.

After walking on some distance we found a nar-
row path leading away southward from the ruined
village, and, believing that it led direct to the Car-
men, the old settlement on the Rio Negro, which
is over twenty miles from the sea, we at once re-
solved to follow it. This path led us wide of
the ocean. Before noon we lost sight of the low
sand-hills on our right hand, and as we pene-
trated further into the interior the dark-leafed
bushes I have mentioned were more abundant.
The dense, stiff, dark-colored foliage of these
bushes give them a strange appearance on the
pale sundried plains, as of black rocks of num-
berless fantastic forms scattered over the grayish-
yellow ground. No large fowls were seen; small
birds were, however, very abundant, gladdening

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 9

the parched wilderness with their minstrelsy.
Most noteworthy among the true songsters were
the Patagonian mocking bird and four or five
finches, two of them new to me. Here I first made
the acquaintance of a singular and very pretty
bird — the red-breasted plant-cutter, a finch too,
but only in appearance. It is a sedentary bird and
sits conspicuously on the topmost twig, display-
ing its ruddy under plumage; occasionally emit-
ting, by way of song, notes that resemble the faint
bleatings of a kid, and, when disturbed, passing
from bush to bush by a series of jerks, the wings
producing a loud humming sound. Most numer-
ous, and surpassing all others in interest, were
the omnipresent Dendrocolaptine bird, or wood-
hewers, or tree-creepers as they are sometimes
called — feeble flyers, in uniform sober brown
plumage ; restless in their habits and loquacious,
with shrill and piercing, or clear resonant voices.
One terrestrial species, with a sandy-brown plum-
age, Upucerthia dumetoria, raced along before us
on the ground, in appearance a stout miniature
ibis with very short legs and exaggerated beak.
Every bush had its little colony of brown gleaners,
small birds of the genus Synallaxis, moving rest-
lessly about among the leaves, occasionally sus-
pending themselves from the twigs head down-
wards, after the manner of tits. From the dis-
tance at intervals came the piercing cries of the
cachalote (Homorus gutturalis) a much larger
bird, sounding like bursts of hysterical laughter.

TO IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

All these Dendrocolaptine birds have an inordi-
nate passion for building, and their nests are very
much larger than small birds usually make.
Where they are abundant the trees and bushes are
sometimes laden with their enormous fabrics, so
that the thought is forced on one that these busy
little architects do assuredly occupy themselves
with a vain unprofitable labor. It is not only the
case that many a small bird builds a nest as big as
a buzzard's, only to contain half a dozen eggs the
size of peas, which might very comfortably be
hatched in a pill-box; but frequently, when the
nest has been finished, the builder sets about de-
molishing it to get the materials for constructing
a second nest. One very common species, Anum-
bius acuticaudatus, variously called in the ver-
nacular the thorn-bird, the woodman, and the fire-
wood-gatherer, sometimes makes three nests in
the course of a year, each composed of a good
armful of sticks. The woodman's nest is, how-
ever, an insignificant structure compared with
that of the obstreperous cachalote mentioned a
moment ago. This bird, which is about as large
as a missel thrush, selects a low thorny bush with
stout wide-spreading branches, and in the center
of it builds a domed nest of sticks, perfectly
spherical and four or five feet deep. The opening
is at the side near the top, and leading to it there
is a narrow arched gallery resting on a horizontal
branch, and about fourteen inches long. So com-
pactly made is this enormous nest that I have

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 11

found it hard to break one up. I have also stood
upright on the dome and stamped on it with my
boots without injuring it at all. During my stay
in Patagonia I found about a dozen of these pa-
latial nests ; and my opinion is that like our own
houses, or, rather, our public buildings, and some
ant-hills, and the vizcacha's village burrows, and
the beaver 's dam, it is made to last for ever.

The only mammal we saw was a small arma-
dillo, Dasypus minutus ; it was quite common, and
early in the day, when we were still fresh and
full of spirits, we amused ourselves by chasing
them. We captured several, and one of my com-
panions, an Italian, killed two and slung them
over his shoulder, remarking that we could cook
and eat them if we grew hungry before reaching
our destination. We were not much troubled with
hunger, but towards noon we began to suffer some-
what from thirst. At midday we saw before us
a low level plain, covered with long coarse grass
of a dull yellowish-green color. Here we hoped
to find water, and before long we descried the
white gleam of a lagoon, as we imagined, but on
a nearer inspection the whiteness or appearance
of water turned out to be only a salt efflorescence
on a barren patch of ground. On this low plain it
was excessively sultry ; not a bush could be found
to shelter us from the sun : all was a monotonous
desert of coarse yellowish grass, out of which
rose, as we advanced, multitudes of mosquitoes,
trumpeting a shrill derisive welcome. The glory

12 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

of the morning that had so enchanted us at the
outset had died out of nature, and the scene was
almost hateful to look on. We were getting tired,
too, but the heat and our thirst, and the intoler-
able fi fo fum of the ravenous mosquitoes would
not suffer us to rest.

In this desolate spot I discovered one object of
interest in a singular little bird, of slender form
and pale yellowish-brown color. Perched on a
stem above the grass it gave utterance at regular
intervals to a clear, long, plaintive whistle, audi-
ble nearly a quarter of a mile away ; and this one
unmodulated note was its only song or call. When
any attempt to approach it was made it would
drop down into the grass, and conceal itself with a
shyness very unusual in a desert place where
small birds have never been persecuted by man.
It might have been a wren, or tree-creeper, or
reed-finch, or pipit; I could not tell, so jealously
did it hide all its pretty secrets from me.

The sight of a group of sand-hills, some two
or three miles to our right, tempted us to turn
aside from the narrow path we had followed for
upwards of six hours: from the summit of these
hills we hoped to be able to discover the end of
our journey. On approaching the group we found
that it formed part of a range stretching south
and north as far as the eye could see. Conclud-
ing that we were now close to the sea once more,
we agreed that our best plan would be, after
taking a refreshing bath, to follow the beach on to

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 13

the mouth of the Eio Negro, where there was a
pilot's house. An hour's walk brought us to
the hill. Climbing to the top, what was our dis-
may at beholding not the open blue Atlantic we
had so confidently expected to see, but an ocean of
barren yellow sand-hills, extending away before
us to where earth and heaven mingled in azure
mist ! I, however, had no right to repine now, as
I had set out that morning desirous only of drink-
ing from that wild cup, which is both bitter and
sweet to the taste. But I was certainly the great-
est sufferer that day, as I had insisted on taking
my large cloth poncho, and it proved a great bur-
den to carry ; then my feet had become so swollen
and painful, through wearing heavy riding boots,
that I was at last compelled to pull off these im-
pediments, and to travel barefooted on the hot
sand and gravel.

Turning our backs on the hills, we started,
wearily enough, to seek the trail we had aban-
doned, directing our course so as to strike it
three or four miles in advance of the point where
we had turned aside. Escaping from the long
grass we again found gravelly, undulating plains,
with scattered dark-leafed bushes, and troops of
little singing and trilling birds. Armadilloes were
also seen, but now they scuttled across our path
with impunity, for we had no inclination to chase
them. It was near sunset when we struck the
path again; but although we had now been over
twelve hours walking in the heat, without tasting

14 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

food or water, we still struggled on. Only when
it grew dark, and a sudden cold wind sprang up
from the sea, making us feel stiff and sore, did
we finally come to a halt. Wood was abundant,
and we made a large fire, and the Italian roasted
the two armadilloes he had patiently been carry-
ing all day. They smelt very tempting when
done ; but I feared that the fat luscious meat would
only increase the torturing thirst I suffered, and
so while the others picked the bones I solaced my-
self with a pipe, sitting in pensive silence by
the fire. Supper done, we stretched ourselves out
by the fire, with nothing but my large poncho over
us, and despite the hardness of our bed and the
cold wind blowing over us, we succeeded in getting
some refreshing sleep.

At three o 'clock in the morning we were up and
on our way again, drowsy and footsore, but for-
tunately feeling less thirsty than on the previous
day. "When we had been walking half an hour
there was a welcome indication of the approach of
day — not in. the sky, where the stars were still
sparkling with midnight brilliancy, but far in ad-
vance of us a little bird broke out into a song mar-
velously sweet and clear. The song was repeated
at short intervals, and by-and-by it was taken up
by other voices, until from every bush came such
soft delicious strains that I was glad of all I
had gone through in my long walk, since it had
enabled me to hear this exquisite melody of the
desert. This early morning singer is a charming

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 15

gray and white finch, the Diuca minor, very com-
mon in Patagonia, and the finest voiced of all the
fringilline birds found there; and that is saying
a great deal. The diucas were sure prophets:
before long the first pale streaks of light appeared
in the east, but when the light grew we looked in
vain for the long-wished river. The sun rose on
the same great undulating plain, with its scat-
tered somber bushes and carpet of sere grass —
that ragged carpet showing beneath it the barren
sand and gravelly soil from which it draws its
scanty subsistence.

For upwards of six hours we trudged doggedly
on over this desert plain, suffering much from
thirst and fatigue, but not daring to give ourselves
rest. At length the aspect of the country began
to change : we were approaching the river settle-
ment. The scanty grass grew scantier, and the
scrubby bushes looked as if they had been browsed
on; our narrow path was also crossed at all
angles by cattle tracks, and grew fainter as we
proceeded, and finally disappeared altogether. A
herd of cattle, slowly winding their way in long
trains towards the open country, was then seen.
Here, too, a pretty little tree called chanar (Gur-
liaca decorticans), began to get common, growing
singly or in small groups. It was about ten to
sixteen feet high, very graceful, with smooth pol-
ished green bole, and pale gray-green mimosa
foliage. It bears a golden fruit as big as a cherry,
with a peculiar delightful flavor, but it was not

16 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

yet the season for ripe fruits, and its branches
were laden only with the great nests of the indus-
trious woodman. Though it was now the end
of December and past the egg season, in my crav-
ing for a drop of moisture I began to pull down
and demolish the nests — no light task, considering
how large and compactly made they were. I was
rewarded for my pains by finding three little
pearly-white eggs, and, feeling grateful for small
mercies, I quickly broke them on my parched
tongue.

Half an hour later, about eleven o'clock, as we
slowly dragged on, a mounted man appeared driv-
ing a small troop of horses towards the river.
We hailed him, and he rode up to us, and informed
us that we were only about a mile from the river,
and after hearing our story he proceeded to catch
horses for us to ride. Springing on to their bare
backs we followed him at a swinging gallop over
that last happy mile of our long journey.

We came very suddenly to the end, for on
emerging from the thickets of dwarf thorn trees
through which we had ridden in single file the
magnificent Eio Negro lay before us. Never river
seemed fairer to look upon: broader than the
Thames at Westminster, and extending away on
either hand until it melted and was lost in the blue
horizon, its low shores clothed in all the glory of
groves and fruit orchards and vineyards and
fields of ripening maize. Far out in the middle
of the swift blue current floated flocks of black-

CHANAR TREES

SERPENT WITH A CROSS

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 17

necked swans, their white plumage shining like
foam in the sunlight; while just beneath us,
scarcely a stone's throw off, stood the thatched
farmhouse of our conductor, the smoke curling
up peacefully from the kitchen chimney. A grove
of large old cherry trees, in which the house was
embowered, added to the charm of the picture;
and as we rode down to the gate we noticed the
fully ripe cherries glowing like live coals amid the
deep green foliage.

CHAPTER n
HOW I BECAME AN IDLER

IF things had gone well with me, if I had spent
my twelve months on the Rio Negro, as I had
meant to do, watching and listening to the birds
of that district, these desultory chapters, which
might be described as a record of what I did not
do, would never have been written. For I should
have been wholly occupied with my special task,
moving in a groove too full of delights to allow of
its being left, even for an occasional run and
taste of liberty ; and seeing one class of objects too
well would have made all others look distant, ob-
scure, and of little interest. But it was not to
be as I had planned it. An accident, to be de-
scribed by-and-by, disabled me for a period, and
the winged people could no longer be followed
with secret steps to their haunts, and their actions
watched through a leafy screen. Lying helpless
on my back through the long sultry midsummer
days, with the white-washed walls of my room for
landscape and horizon, and a score or two of buz-
zing house-flies, perpetually engaged in their in-
tricate airy dance, for only company, I was forced
to think on a great variety of subjects, and to

18

HOW I BECAME AN IDLEE 19

occupy my mind with other problems than that of
migration. These other problems, too, were in
many ways like the flies that shared my apart-
ment, and yet always remained strangers to me,
as I to them, since between their minds and mine
a great gulf was fixed. Small unpainful riddles
of the earth ; flitting, sylph-like things, that began
life as abstractions, and developed, like imago
from maggot, into entities: I always flitting
among them, as they performed their mazy dance,
whirling in circles, falling and rising, poised mo-
tionless, then suddenly cannoning against me for
an instant, mocking my power to grasp them,
and darting off again at a tangent. Baffled I
would drop out of the game, like a tired fly that
goes back to his perch, but like the resting, restive
fly I would soon turn towards them again; per-
haps to see them all wheeling in a closer order,
describing new fantastic figures, with swifter mo-
tions, their forms turned to thin black lines, cross-
ing and recrossing in every direction, as if they
had all combined to write a series of strange char-
acters in the air, all forming a strange sentence
— the secret of secrets ! Happily for the progress
of knowledge only a very few of these fascinating
elusive insects of the brain can appear before us
at the same time: as a rule we fix our attention
on a single individual, like a falcon amid a flight
of pigeons or a countless army of small field
finches ; or a dragon-fly in the thick of a cloud of
mosquitoes, or infinitesimal sand-flies. Hawk and

20 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

dragon-fly would starve if they tried to capture,
or even regarded, more than one at a time.

I caught nothing, and found out nothing ; never-
theless, these days of enforced idleness were not
unhappy. And after leaving my room, hobbling
round with the aid of a stout stick, and sitting in
houses, I consorted with men and women, and
listened day by day to the story of their small un-
avian affairs, until it began to interest me. But
not too keenly. I could always quit them without
regret to lie on the green sward, to gaze up into
the trees or the blue sky, and speculate on all im-
aginable things. The result was that when no
longer any excuse for inaction existed use had
bred a habit in me — the habit of indolence, which
was quite common among the people of Patagonia,
and appeared to suit the genial climate ; and this
habit and temper of mind I retained, with occa-
sional slight relapses, during the whole period of
my stay.

Our waking life is sometimes like a dream,
which proceeds logically enough until the stimulus
of some new sensation, from without or within,
throws it into temporary confusion, or suspends
its action ; after which it goes on again, but with
fresh characters, passions, and motives, and a
changed argument.

After feasting on cherries, and resting at the
estancia, or farm, where we first touched the shore,
we went on to the small town of El Carmen, which

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 21

has existed since the last century, and is built
on the side of a hill, or bluff, facing the river. On
the opposite shore, where there is no cliff nor high
bank, and the low level green valley extends back
four or five miles to the gray barren uplands,
there is another small town called La Merced. In
these two settlements I spent about a fortnight,
and then, in company with a young Englishman,
who had been one or two years in the colony, I
started for an eighty miles' ride up the river.
Half way to our destination we put up at a small
log hut, which my companion had himself built
a year before; but finding, too late, that the
ground would produce nothing, he had lately aban-
doned it, leaving his tools and other belongings
locked up in the place.

A curious home and repository was this same
little rude cabin. The interior was just roomy
enough to enable a man of my height (six feet)
to stand upright and swing a cat in without knock-
ing out its brains against the upright rough-
barked willow-posts that made the walls. Yet
within this limited space was gathered a store of
weapons, tackle, and tools, sufficient to have en-
abled a small colony of men to fight the wilderness
and found a city of the future. My friend had
an ingenious mind and an amateur's knowledge
of a variety of handicrafts. The way to make him
happy was to tell him that you had injured some-
thing made of iron or brass — a gun-lock, watch, or
anything complicated. His eyes would shine, he

22 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

would rub his hands and be all eagerness to get
at the new patient to try his surgical skill on him.
Now he had to give two or three days to all these
wood and metal friends of his, to give a fresh edge
to his chisels, and play the dentist to his saws ; to
spread them all out and count and stroke them
lovingly, as a breeder pats his beasties, and feed
and anoint them with oil to make them shine and
look glad. This was preliminary to the packing
for transportation, which was also a rather slow
process.

Leaving my friend at his delightful task I ram-
bled about the neighborhood taking stock of the
birds. It was a dreary and desolate spot, with
a few old gaunt and half-dead red willows for
only trees. The reeds and rushes standing in the
black stagnant pools were yellow and dead; and
dead also were the tussocks of coarse tow-colored
grass, while the soil beneath was white as ashes
and cracked everywhere with the hot suns and
long drought. Only the river close by was always
cool and green and beautiful.

At length, one hot afternoon, we were sitting
on our rugs on the clay floor of the hut, talking
of our journey on the morrow, and of the better
fare and other delights we should find at the end
of the day at the house of an English settler we
were going to visit. While talking I took up his
revolver to examine it for the first time, and he
had just begun to tell me that it was a revolver
with a peculiar character of its own, and with

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 23

idiosyncrasies, one of which was that the slightest
touch, or even vibration of the air, would cause it
to go off when on the cock — he was just telling
me this, when off it went with a terrible bang and
sent a conical bullet into my left knee, an inch or
so beneath the knee-cap. The pain was not much,
the sensation resembling that caused by a smart
blow on the knee; but on attempting to get up I
fell back. I could not stand. Then the blood
began to flow in a thin but continuous stream
from the round symmetrical bore which seemed to
go straight into the bone of the joint, and nothing
that we could do would serve to stop it. Here
we were in a pretty fix ! Thirty-six miles from the
settlement, and with no conveyance that my friend
could think of except a cart at a house several
miles up the river, but on the wrong side! He,
however, in his anxiety to do something, imagined,
or hoped, that by some means the cart might be
got over the river, and so, after thoughtfully put-
ting a can of water by my side, he left me lying
on my saddle-rugs, and, after fastening the door
on the outside to prevent the intrusion of unwel-
come prowlers, he mounted his horse and rode
away. He had promised that, with or without
some wheeled thing, he would be back not long
after dark. But he did not return all night; he
had found a boat and boatman to transport him
to the other side only to learn that his plan was
impracticable, and then returning with the disap-
pointing tidings, found no boat to recross, and

24 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

so in the end was obliged to tie his horse to a
bush and lie down to wait for morning.

For me night came only too soon. I had no
candle, and the closed, windowless cabin was in-
tensely dark. My wounded leg had become in-
flamed and pained a great deal, but the bleeding
continued until the handkerchiefs we had bound
round it were saturated. I was fully dressed, and
as the night grew chilly I pulled my big cloth
poncho, that had a soft fluffy lining, over me for
warmth. I soon gave up expecting my friend,
and knew that there would be no relief until morn-
ing. But I could neither doze nor think, and could
only listen. From my experience during those
black anxious hours I can imagine how much the
sense of hearing must be to the blind and to ani-
mals that exist in dark caves. At length, about
midnight, I was startled by a slight curious sound
in the intense silence and darkness. It was in the
cabin and close to me. I thought at first it was like
the sound made by a rope drawn slowly over the
clay floor. I lighted a wax match, but the sound
had ceased, and I saw nothing. After awhile I
heard it again, but it now seemed to be out of
doors and going round the hut, and I paid little
attention to it. It soon ceased, and I heard it
no more. So silent and dark was it thereafter that
the hut I reposed in might have been a roomy cof-
fin in which I had been buried a hundred feet be-
neath the surface of the earth. Yet I was no
longer alone, if I had only known it, but had now

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 25

a messmate and bedfellow who had subtly crept in
to share the warmth of the cloak and of my per-
son— one with a broad arrow-shaped head, set
with round lidless eyes like polished yellow peb-
bles, and a long smooth limbless body, strangely
segmented and vaguely written all over with mys-
tic characters in some dusky tint on an indetermi-
nate grayish-tawny ground.

At length, about half -past three to four o'clock
a most welcome sound was heard — the familiar
twittering of a pair of scissor-tail tyrant birds
from a neighboring willow-tree; and after an in-
terval, the dreamy, softly rising and falling,
throaty warblings of the white-rumped swallow.
A loved and beautiful bird is this, that utters his
early song circling round and round in the dusky
air, when the stars begin to pale; and his song,
perhaps, seems sweeter than all others, because
it corresponds in time to that rise in the tempera-
ture and swifter flow of the blood — the inward
resurrection experienced on each morning of our
individual life. Next in order the red-billed
finches begin to sing — a curious, gobbling, impetu-
ous performance, more like a cry than a song.
These are pretty reed birds, olive-green, buff-
breasted, with long tails and bright red beaks.
The intervals between their spasmodic bursts of
sound were filled up with the fine frail melody of
the small brown and gray crested song-sparrows.
Last of all was heard the long, leisurely-uttered
chanting cry of the brown carrion-hawk, as he

26 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

flew past, and I knew that the morning was beau-
tiful in the east. Little by little the light began to
appear through the crevices, faint at first, like
faintly-traced pallid lines on a black ground, then
brighter and broader until I, too, had a dim twi-
light in the cabin.

Not until the sun was an hour up did my friend
return to me to find me hopeful still, and with all
my faculties about me, but unable to move without
assistance. Putting his arms around me he helped
me up, and just as I had got erect on my sound
leg, leaning heavily on him, out from beneath the
poncho lying at my feet glided a large serpent of
a venomous kind, the Craspedocephalus alterna-
tus, called in the vernacular the serpent with a
cross. Had my friend's arms not been occupied
with sustaining me he, no doubt, would have at-
tacked it with the first weapon that offered, and
in all probability killed it, with the result that I
should have suffered from a kind of vicarious
remorse ever after. Fortunately it was not long
in drawing its coils out of sight and danger into a
hole in the wall. My hospitality had been uncon-
scious, nor, until that moment, had I known that
something had touched me, and that virtue had
gone out from me; but I rejoice to think that
the secret deadly creature, after lying all night
with me, warming its chilly blood with my warmth,
went back unbruised to its den.

Speaking of this serpent with a strange name,
I recall the fact that Darwin made its acquaint-

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 27

ance during his Patagonian rambles about sixty
years ago; and in describing its fierce and hide-
ous aspect, remarks, "I do not think I ever saw
anything more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of
the vampire bats." He speaks of the great
breadth of the jaws at the base, the triangular
snout, and the linear pupil in the midst of the
mottled coppery iris, and suggests that its ugly
and horrible appearance is due to the resemblance
of its face, in its shape, to the human countenance.
This idea of the ugliness or repulsiveness of
an inferior animal, due to its resemblance to man
in face, is not, I believe, uncommon ; and I suppose
that the reason that would be given for the feeling
is that an animal of that kind looks like a vile
copy of ourselves, or like a parody maliciously
designed to mock us. It is an erroneous idea, or,
at all events, is only a half-truth, as we recognize
at once when we look at animals that are more
or less human-like in countenance, and yet cause
no repulsion. Seals may be mentioned — the mer-
maids and mermen of the old mariners; also the
sloth with its round simple face, to which its hu-
man shape imparts a somewhat comical and pa-
thetic look. Many monkeys seem ugly to us, but
we think the lemurs beautiful, and greatly admire
the marmosets, those hairy manikins with spright-
ly, bird-like eyes. And yet it is true that there
is something human in the faces of this and per-
haps of other pit-vipers, and of some vampire bats,
as Darwin remarks; and that the horror they

28 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

excite in us is due to this resemblance;, what he
failed to see was that it is the expression rather
than the shape that horrifies. For in these crea-
tures it simulates such expressions as excite fear
and abhorrence in our own species, or pity so
intense as to be painful — ferocity, stealthy, watch-
ful malignity, a set look of anguish or despair, or
some dreadful form of insanity. Some one has
well and wisely said that there is no ugliness in
us except the expression of evil thoughts and
passions ; for these do most assuredly write them-
selves on the countenance. Looking at a serpent
of this kind, and I have looked at many a one, the
fancy is born in me that I am regarding what
was once a fellow-being, perhaps one of those
cruel desperate wretches I have encountered on
the outskirts of civilization, who for his crimes has
been changed into the serpent form, and cursed
with immortality.

As a rule the deceptive resemblances and self-
plagiarisms of nature, when we light by chance on
them, give us only pleasure, heightened by wonder
or a sense of mystery; but the case of this ser-
pent forms an exception: in spite of the tender-
ness I cherish towards the entire ophidian race,
the sensation is not agreeable.

To return. My friend made a fire to boil water,
and after we had had some breakfast, he galloped
off once more in a new direction; he had at last
remembered that on our side of the river there

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 29

lived a settler who owned a bullock-cart, and to
him he went. About ten o 'clock he returned, and
was shortly followed by the man with his lum-
bering cart drawn by a couple of bullocks. In
this conveyance, suffering much from the heat and
dust and joltings on the rough hard road, I was
carried back to the settlement. Oxen travel slowly,
and we were on the road all day and all night, and
only reached our destination when the eastern sky
had begun to grow bright, and the swallows from
a thousand roosting-places were rising in wide
circles into the still, dusky air, making it vocal
with their warblings.

My miserable journey ended at the Mission
House of the South American Missionary Society,
in the village on the south bank of the river, fac-
ing the old town; and the change from the jolting
cart to a comfortable bed was an unspeakable
relief, and soon induced refreshing sleep. Later
in the day, on awakening, I found myself in the
hands of a gentleman who was a skillful surgeon
as well as a divine, one who had extracted more
bullets and mended broken bones than most sur-
geons who do not practise on battle-fields. My
bullet, however, refused to be extracted, or even
found in its hiding-place, and every morning for
a fortnight I had a bad quarter of an hour, when
my host would present himself in my room with
a quiet smile on his lips and holding in his hands
a bundle of probes — oh, those probes! — of all
forms, sizes, and materials — wood, ivory, steel,

30 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

and gutta-percha. These painful moments over,
with no result except the re-opening of a wound
that wished to heal, there would be nothing more
for me to do but to lie watching the flies, as I have
said, and dreaming.

To conclude this vari-colored chapter, I may
here remark that some of the happiest moments
of my life have been occasioned by those very cir-
cumstances which one would imagine would have
made me most unhappy — by grave accidents, and
sickness, which have disabled and cast me a bur-
den upon strangers; and by adversity, —

Which, like a toad, ugly and venomous,
Yet wears a precious jewel in its head.

Familiar words, but here newly interpreted; for
this jewel which I have found — man's love for
man, and the law of helpful kindness written in
the heart — is worthy to be prized above all our
possessions, and is most beautiful, outshining the
lapidary's gems, and of so sovereign a virtue that
cynicism itself grows mute and ashamed in its
light.

CHAPTER HI
VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER

STILL a lingerer in the hospitable shade of
the Mission House, my chief pleasure during
th~e early days of February was in observing the
autumnal muster of the purple swallows — Progne
furcata — a species which was abundant at this
point, breeding in the cliffs overhanging the river ;
also, like so many other swallows in all places,
ander the eaves of houses. It is a large, beautiful
bird, its whole upper plumage of a rich, glossy,
deep purple hue, its under surface black. No such
large swallows as this, with other members of its
genus, are known in the Old World ; and a visitor
from Europe would probably, on first seeing one
of these birds, mistake it for a swift; but it has
not got the narrow, scythe-shaped wings of the
swift, nor does it rush through the air in the
swift's mad way; on the contrary, its flight is
much calmer, with fewer quick doublings than
that of other swallows. It also differs from most
members of its family in possessing a set song of
several modulated notes, which are occasionally
warbled in a leisurely manner as the bird soars
high in the air : as a melodist it should rank high
among the hirundines.

31

32 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

The trees of the Mission House proved very
attractive to these birds ; the tall Lombardy pop-
lars were specially favored, which seems strange,
for in a high wind (and it was very windy just
then) the slim unresting tree forms as bad a
perching-place as a bird could well settle on.
Nevertheless, to the poplars they would come
when the wind was most violent; first hovering
or wheeling about in an immense flock, then, as oc-
casion offered, dropping down, a few at a time, to
cling, like roosting locusts, to the thin vertical
branches, clustering thicker and thicker until the
high trees looked black with them ; then a mightier
gust would smite and sway the tall tops down, and
the swallows, blown from their insecure perch,
would rise in a purple cloud to scatter chattering
all over the windy heavens, only to return and
congregate, hovering and clinging as before.

Lying on the grass, close to the river bank, I
would watch them by the hour, noting their unrest
and indecision, the strangeness and wild spirit
that made the wind and vexed poplars congenial
to them ; for something new and strange had come
to trouble them — the subtle breath

That in a po./erful language, felt, not heard,
Instructs the fowls of heaven.

But as to the character of that breath I vainly
questioned Nature, — she being the only woman
who can keep a secret, even from a lover.

SWALLOWS CONGREGATING

Rain cam at last', and fell continuously during
an entire night. Next morning (February 14th)
when I went out and looked up at the sky, covered
with gray hurrying clouds, I saw a flock of forty
or fifty large swallows speeding north ; and after
these I saw no more ; for on that first wet morn-
ing, before I had risen, the purple cloud had for-
saken the valley.

I missed them greatly, and wished that they
had delayed their going, since it was easier and
more hopeful to ponder on the mystery of their
instinct when they were with me. That break in
the tenor of their lives; the enforced change of
habits ; the conflict between two opposite emotions
— the ties of place that held them back, seen and
guessed in their actions, and the voice that called
them away, speaking ever more imperatively,
which so wrought in them that at moments they
were beside themselves — noting all this, hearing
and seeing it at all hours of the day, I seemed to
be nearer to the discovery of some hidden truth
than when they were no longer in sight. But now
they were gone, and with their departure had van-
ished my last excuse for resting longer inactive —
at that spot, at all events.

I started afresh on my up-river journey, and
paid a long visit to an English estancia about
sixty miles from the town. I spent much of my
time there in solitary rambles, tasting once more
of the "sweet and bitter cup of wild Nature."
Her color was gray, her mood pensive as winter

34 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

deepened, and there was nothing in the cup to in-
flame the fancy. But it was tonic. My rides were
often to the hills, or terraced uplands, outside of
the level valley; but my description of that gray
desolate solitude and its effects on me must be
reserved for a later chapter, when I shall have
dropped once for all this thread of narrative,
slight and loosely held as it is. In the present
chapter and the succeeding one I shall treat of
the aspects of nature in the valley itself. For I
did not remain too long at any one point, but dur-
ing the autumn, winter, and spring months I re-
sided at various points, and visited the mouth of
the river and adjacent plains on both sides, then
went up river again to a distance of something
over a hundred miles.

The valley, in this space, does not vary much
in appearance; it may be described as the level
bed of an ancient river, five or six miles wide, cut
out in the plateau, with the existing river — a swift,
deep stream, two hundred to three hundred yards
broad — serpentining along its middle. But it
does not keep to the middle; in its windings it
approaches now the north, now the south, plateau,
and at some points touches the extreme limits of
the valley, and even cuts into the bank-like front
of the high land, which forms a sheer cliff above
the current, in some spots a hundred feet high.

The river was certainly miscalled Cusar-leofu,
or Black Eiver, by the aborigines, unless the
epithet referred only to its swiftness and danger-

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER 35

ous character ; for it is not black at all in appear-
ance, like its Amazonian namesake. The water,
which flows from the Andes across a continent of
stone and gravel, is wonderfully pure, in color
a clear sea-green. So green does it look to the
eye in some lights that when dipped up in a glass
vessel one marvels to see it changed, no longer
green, but crystal as dew or rain drop. Doubtless
man is naturally scientific, and finds out why
things are not what they seem, and gets to the
bottom of all mysteries; but his older, deeper,
primitive, still persistent nature is non-scientific
and mythical, and, in spite of reason, he wonders
at the change ; — it is a miracle, a manifestation of
the intelligent life and power that is in all things.

The river has its turbid days, although few and
far between. One morning, on going down to the
water, I was astonished to find it no longer the
lovely hue of the previous evening, but dull red —
red with the red earth that some swollen tributary
hundreds of miles to the west had poured into its
current. This change lasts only a day or two,
after which the river runs green and pure again.

The valley at the end of a long hot windy sum-
mer had an excessively dry and barren appear-
ance. The country, I was told, had suffered from
scarcity of rain for three years: at some points
even the roots of the dry dead grass had been
blown away, and when the wind was strong a
cloud of yellow dust hung all day over the valley.
In such places sheep were dying of starvation:

36 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

cattle and horses fared better, as they went out
into the uplands to browse on the bushes. The
valley soil is thin, being principally sand and
gravel, with a slight admixture of vegetable
mold ; and its original vegetation was made up of
coarse perennial grasses, herbaceous shrubs and
rushes: the domestic cattle introduced by the
white settlers destroyed these slow-growing
grasses and plants, and, as has happened in most
temperate regions of the globe colonized by Euro-
peans, the sweet, quick-growing, short-lived
grasses and clovers of the Old World sprang up
and occupied the soil. Here, however, owing to
its poverty, the excessive dryness of the climate,
and the violence of the winds that prevail in sum-
mer, the new imported vegetation has proved but
a sorry substitute for the old and vanished. It
does not grow large enough to retain the scanty
moisture, it is too short-lived, and the frail
quickly-perishing rootlets do not bind the earth
together, like the tough fibrous blanket formed
by the old grasses. The heat burns it to dust and
ashes, the wind blows it away, blade and root, and
the surface soil with it, in many places disclosing
the yellow underlying sand with all that was
buried in it of old. For the result of this strip-
ping of the surface has been that the sites of
numberless villages of the former inhabitants of
the valley have been brought to light. I have
visited a dozen such village sites in the course
of one hour's walk, so numerous were they.

VALLEY OF THE BLACK EIVEE 37

Where the village had been a populous one, or
inhabited for a long period, the ground was a
perfect bed of chipped stones, and among these
fragments were found arrow-heads, flint knives
and scrapers, mortars and pestles, large round
stones with a groove in the middle, pieces of hard
polished stone used as anvils, perforated shells,
fragments of pottery, and bones of animals. My
host remarked one day that the valley that year
had produced nothing but a plentiful crop of ar-
row-heads. The anthropologist could not have
wished for a more favorable year or for a better
crop. I collected a large number of these objects;
and some three or four hundred arrow-heads
which I picked up are at present, I believe, in the
famous Pitt-Rivers collection. But I was over-
careful. The finest of my treasures, the most curi-
ous and beautiful objects I could select, packed
apart for greater safety, were unfortunately lost
in transit — a severe blow, which hurt me more
than the wound I had received on the knee.

At some of the villages I examined, within a few
yards of the ground where the huts had stood, I
found deposits of bones of animals that had been
used as food. These were of the rhea, huanaco,
deer, peccary, dolichotis or Patagonian hare, ar-
madillo, coypu, vizcacha, with others of smaller
mammals and birds. Most numerous among them
were the bones of the small cavy (Cavia australis),
a form of the guinea-pig; and of the tuco-tuco

38 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

(Ctenomys magellanica), a small rodent with the
habits of the mole.

A most interesting fact was that the arrow-
heads I picked up in different villages were of
two widely different kinds — the large and rudely
fashioned, resembling the Palaeolithic arrow-heads
of Europe, and the highly-finished, or Neolithic,
arrow-heads of various forms and sizes, but in
most specimens an inch and a half to two inches
long. Here there were the remains of the two
great periods of the Stone Age, the last of which
continued down till the discovery and colonization
of the country by Europeans. The weapons and
other objects of the latter period were the most
abundant, and occurred in the valley: the ruder
more ancient weapons were found on the hill-sides,
in places where the river cuts into the plateau.
The site where I picked up the largest number
had been buried to a depth of seven or eight feet ;
only where the water after heavy rains had washed
great masses of sand and gravel away, the arrow-
heads, with other weapons and implements, had
been exposed. These deeply-buried settlements
were doubtless very ancient.

Coming back to the more modern work, I was
delighted to find traces of a something like division
of labor in different villages ; of the individuality
of the worker, and a distinct artistic or esthetic
taste. I was led to this conclusion by the dis-
covery of a village site where no large round
stones, knives and scrapers were found, and no

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER 39

large arrow-heads of the usual type. The only
arrow-heads at this spot were about half an inch
long, and were probably used only to shoot small
birds and mammals. Not only were they minute
but most exquisitely finished, with a fine serration,
and, without an exception, made of some beauti-
ful stone — crystal, agate, and green, yellow, and
horn-colored flint. It was impossible to take half-
a-dozen of these gems of color and workmanship
in the hand and not be impressed at once with the
idea that beauty had been as much an aim to the
worker as utility. Along with these fine arrow-
heads I found nothing except one small well-
pointed dagger of red stone, its handle a cross,
about four inches long, and as slender and almost
as well-rounded as an ordinary lead pencil.

"When on this quest I sometimes attempted to
picture to myself something of the outer and
inner life of the long-vanished inhabitants. The
red men of to-day may be of the same race and
blood, the lineal descendants of the workers in
stone in Patagonia; but they are without doubt
so changed, and have lost so much, that their pro-
genitors would not know them, nor acknowledge
them as relations. Here, as in North America,
contact with a superior race has debased them
and ensured their destruction. Some of their wild
blood will continue to flow in the veins of those
who have taken their place ; but as a race they will
be blotted out from earth, as utterly extinct in a
few decades as the mound-makers of the Missis-

40 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

sippi valley, and the races that built the forest-
grown cities of Yucatan and Central America.
The men of the past in the Patagonian valley were
alone with nature, makers of their own weapons
and self-sustaining, untouched by any outside in-
fluence, and with no knowledge of any world be-
yond their valley and the adjacent uninhabited
uplands. And yet, judging even from that dim
partial glimpse I had had of their vanished life,
in the weapons and fragments I had picked up, it
seemed evident that the mind was not wholly dor-
mant in them, and that they were slowly pro-
gressing to a higher condition.

Beyond that fact I could not go: all efforts to
know more, or to imagine more, ended in failure,
as all such efforts must end. On another occa-
sion, as I propose to show in a later chapter, the
wished vision of the past came unsought and un-
expectedly to me, and for a while I saw nature
as the savage sees it, and as he saw it in that
stone age I pondered over, only without the super-
naturalism that has so large a place in his mind.
By taking thought I am convinced that we can
make no progress in this direction, simply because
we cannot voluntarily escape from our own per-
sonality, our environment, our outlook on Na-
ture.

Not only were my efforts idle, but merely to
think on the subject sometimes had the effect of
bringing a shadow, a something of melancholy,
over my mind, the temper which is fatal to inves-

AN INDIAN BURIAL-PLACE

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER 41

tigation, causing "all things to droop and lan-
guish. ' ' In such a mood I would make my way to
one of the half-a-dozen ancient burial-places ex-
isting in the neighborhood of the house I was
staying at. As a preference I would go to the
largest and most populous, where half an acre
of earth was strewn thick with crumbling skele-
tons. Here by searching closely a few arrow-
heads and ornaments, that had been interred with
the dead, could also be found. And here I would
sit and walk about on the hot barren yellow sand —
the faithless sand to which the bitter secret had
so long ago been vainly entrusted ; careful in walk-
ing not to touch an exposed skull with my foot, al-
though the hoof of the next wild thing that passed
would shatter it to pieces like a vessel of fragile
glass. The polished intensely white surfaces of
such skulls as had been longest exposed to the sun
reflected the noonday light so powerfully that it
almost pained the eyes to look at them. In places
where they were thickly crowded together, I would
stop to take them up and examine them, one by
one, only to put them carefully down again; and
sometimes holding one in my hand, I would pour
out the yellow sand that filled its cavity; and
watching the shining stream as it fell, only the
vainest of vain thoughts and conjectures were
mine.

CHAPTER IV
ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY

TO go back for a brief space to those Golgothas
that I frequently visited in the valley, not
as collector nor archaeologist, and in no scientific
spirit, but only, as it seemed, to indulge in mourn-
ful thoughts. If by looking into the empty cavity
of one of those broken unburied skulls I had been
able to see, as in a magic glass, an image of the
world as it once existed in the living brain, what
should I have seen? Such a question would not
and could not, I imagine, be suggested by the sight
of a bleached broken human skull in any other
region; but in Patagonia it does not seem gro-
tesque, nor merely idle, nor quite fanciful, like
Buff on's notion of a geometric figure impressed
on the hive-bee 's brain. On the contrary, it strikes
one there as natural ; and the answer to it is easy,
and only one answer is possible.

In the cavity, extending from side to side, there
would have appeared a band of color ; its margins
gray, growing fainter and bluer outwardly, and
finally fading into nothing; between the gray
edges the band would be green; and along this
green middle band, not always keeping to the

42

THE RIVER BY MOONLIGHT

SNOW AT EL CAKAIEN

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 43

center, there would appear a sinuous shiny line,
like a serpent with glittering skin lying at rest
on the grass. For the river must have been to
the aboriginal inhabitants of the valley the one
great central unforgettable fact in nature and
man's life. If as nomads or colonists from some
cis- or trans- Andean country, they had originally
brought hither traditions, and some supernatural
system that took its form and color from a differ-
ent nature, these had been modified, if not wholly
dissolved and washed away in that swift eternal
green current, by the side of which they con-
tkiued to dwell from generation to generation,
forgetting all ancient things. The shining stream
was always in sight, and when, turning their
backs on it, they climbed out of the valley, they
saw only gray desolation — a desert where life was
impossible to man — fading into the blue haze
of the horizon; and there was nothing beyond it.
On that gray strip, on the borders of the unknown
beyond, they could search for tortoises, and hunt
a few wild animals, and gather a few wild fruits,
and hard woods and spines for weapons; and
then return to the river, as children go back to
their mother. All things were reflected in its
waters, the infinite blue sky, the clouds and heav-
enly bodies; the trees and tall herbage on its
banks, and their dark faces ; and just as they were
mirrored in it, so its current was mirrored in their
minds. The old man, grown blind with age, from
constantly seeing its image so bright and per-

44 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

sistent, would be unconscious of his blindness. It
was thus more to him than all other objects and
forces in nature ; the Inca might worship sun and
lightning and rainbow; to the inhabitant of the
valley the river was more than these, the most
powerful thing in nature, the most beneficent, and
his chief god.

I do not know, nor can any one know, whether
the former dwellers in the valley left any descend-
ants, any survivors of that age that left some
traces of a brightening intellect on its stone work.
Probably not ; the few Indians now inhabiting the
valley are most probably modern colonists of an-
other family or nation ; yet it did not surprise me
to hear that some of these half-tame, half-chris-
tianized savages had, not long before my visit,
sacrificed a white bull to the river, slaying it on
the bank and casting its warm, bleeding body into
the current.

Even the European colonists have not been un-
affected psychologically by the peculiar conditions
they live in, and by the river, on which they are
dependent. When first I became cognizant of this
feeling, which was very soon, I was disposed to
laugh a little at the very large place the river
occupied in all men's minds; but after a few
months of life on its banks it was hardly less to
me than to others, and I experienced a kind of
shame when I recalled my former want of rever-
ence, as if I had made a jest of something sacred.
Nor to this day can I think of the Patagonian

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 45

river merely as one of the rivers I know. Other
streams, by comparison, seem vulgar, with no
higher purpose than to water man and beast, and
to serve, like canals, as a means of transport.

One day, to the house where I was staying near
the town, there came a native lady on a visit,
bringing with her six bright blue-eyed children.
As we, the elders, sat in the living-room, sipping
mate and talking, one of the youngsters, an intel-
ligent-looking boy of nine, came in from play, and
getting him by me I amused him for a while with
some yarns and with talk about beasts and birds.
He asked me where I lived. My home, I said, was
in the Buenos Ayrean pampas, far north of Pata-
gonia.

"Is it near the river," he asked, "right on the
bank, like this house?"

I explained that it was on a great, grassy, level
plain, that there was no river there, and that when
I went out on horseback I did not have to ride
up and down a valley, but galloped away in any
direction — north, south, east, or west. He listened
with a twinkle in his eyes, then with a merry laugh
ran out again to join the others at their game.
It was as if I had told him that I lived up in a
tree that grew to the clouds, or under the sea, or
some such impossible thing; it was nothing but- a
joke to him. His mother, sitting near, had been
listening to us, and when the boy laughed and
ran out, I remarked to her that to a child born
and living always in that valley, shut in by the

46 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

thorny, waterless uplands, it was, perhaps, incon-
ceivable that in other places people could exist out
of a valley and away from a river. She looked
at me with a puzzled expression in her eyes, as if
trying to see something mentally which her eyes
had never seen — trying, in fact, to create some-
thing out of nothing. She agreed with me in
some hesitating words, and I felt that I had put
my foot in it ; for only then I recalled the fact that
she also had been born in the valley — the great-
granddaughter of one of the original founders of
the colony — and was probably as incapable as the
child of imagining any other conditions than those
she had always been accustomed to.

It struck me that the children here have a very
healthy, happy life, especially those whose homes
are in the narrow parts of the valley, who are able
to ramble every day into the thorny uplands in
search of birds ' eggs and other pretty things, and
the wild flavors and little adventures that count
for so much with the very young. In birds ' eggs,
the greatest prizes are those of the partridge-
like tinamous, the beautifully mottled and crested
martineta (Calodromas elegans), that lays a dozen
eggs as large as those of a fowl, with deep-green
polished shells ; and the smaller Nothura darwini,
whose eggs vary in tint from wine-purple to a red-
dish-purple or liver color. In summer and au-
tumn fruits and sweet gums are not scarce. One
gray-leafed herbaceous shrub is much sought after
for its sap, that oozes from the stem and hardens

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 47

in small globes and lumps that look and taste like
white sugar. There is a small disk-shaped cactus,
growing close to the surface, and well defended
with sharp spines, which bears a pinkish-yellow
fruit with a pleasant taste. There is also a large
cactus, four or five feet high, so dark-green as to
appear almost black among the pale-gray bushes.
It bears a splendid crimson flower, and a crimson
fruit that is insipid and not considered worth eat-
ing; but being of so beautiful a color to see it is
sufficient pleasure. The plant is not very com-
mon, and one does not see too many of the fruits
even in a long day 's ramble :

Like stones of worth, they thinly placed are.

The chanar bears a fruit like a cherry in size, and,
like a cherry, with a stone inside; it has a white
pulp and a golden skin ; the flavor is peculiar and
delicious, and seemed to be greatly appreciated by
the birds, so that the children get little. Another
wild fruit is that of the Piquellin (Condalia spi-
nosa), the dark-leafed bush which was mentioned
in the first chapter. Its oval-shaped berries are
less than currants in size, but are in such pro-
fusion that the broad tops of the bushes become
masses of deep color in autumn. There are two
varieties, one crimson, the other purple-black, like
sloes and blackberries. They have a strong but
not unpleasant flavor, and the children are so fond
of them that, like the babes in the wood, their little

48 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

lips are all bestained and red with the beautiful
juice.

The magnetism of the river (to go back to that
subject) is probably intensified by the prevailing
monotonous grays, greens, and browns of nature
on either side of it. It has the powerful effect of
brightness, which fascinates us, as it does the
moth, and the eye is drawn to it as to a path of
shining silver — that is, of silver in some condi-
tions of the atmosphere, and of polished steel in
others. At ordinary times there is no other
brightness in nature to draw the sight away and
divide the attention. Only twice in the year, for
a brief season in spring and again in autumn,
there is anything like large masses of bright color
in the vegetation to delight the eyes. The com-
monest of the gray-foliaged plants that grow on
the high grounds along the borders of the valley
is the chanar, Gurliaca decorticans, a tree in form,
but scarcely more than a bush in size. In late
October it bears a profusion of flowers in clusters,
in shape, size, and brilliant yellow color resem-
bling the flower of the broom. .A f this season the
uplands along the valley have a otrangely gay ap-
pearance. Again, there is yellow in the autumn —
the deeper yellow of xanthophyl — when the
leaves of the red willows growing on the banks
of the river change their color before falling. This
willow (Salix humboldtiana) is the only large wild
tree in the country ; but whether it grew here prior
to the advent of the Spanish or not, I do not know?

THE BLACK VULTURE

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 49

But its existence is now doomed as a large tree of
a century's majestic growth, forming a suitable
perch and lookout for the harpy and gray eagles,
common in the valley, and the still more common
vultures and Polybori, and of the high-roosting,
noble black-faced ibis; a home and house, too, of
the Magellanic eagle-owl and the spotted wild cat
(Felis geoffroyi) ; and where even the puma could
lie at ease on a horizontal branch thirty or forty
feet above the earth. Being of soft wood, it can
be cut down very easily; and when felled and
lashed in rafts on the river, it is floated down
stream to supply the inhabitants with a cheap
wood for fuel, building, and other purposes.

At the highest point I reached in my rambles
along the valley, about a hundred and twenty
miles from the coast, there was a very extensive
grove or wood of this willow, many of the trees
very large, and some dead from age. I visited this
spot with an English friend, who resided some
twenty miles lower down, and spent a day and a
half wading about waist-deep through the tall,
coarse grasses and rushes under the gaunt, leafless
trees, for the season was midwinter. The weather
was the worst I had experienced in the country,
being piercingly cold, with a violent wind and
frequent storms of rain and sleet. The rough, wet
boles of the trees rose up tall and straight like
black pillars from the rank herbage beneath, and
on the higher branches innumerable black vultures
(Cathartes atratus) were perched, waiting all the

50 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

dreary day long for fair weather to fly abroad
in search of food.

On the ground this vulture does not appear to
advantage, especially when bobbing and jumping
about, performing the " buzzard lope," when quar-
reling with his fellows over a carcass: but when
perched aloft, his small naked rugous head and
neck and horny curved beak seen well-defined
above the broad black surface of the folded wing,
he does not show badly. As I had no wish to
make a bag of vultures and saw nothing else, I
shot nothing.

A little past noon on the second day we saddled
our horses and started on our homeward ride;
and although the wind still blew a gale, lashing the
river into a long line of foam on the opposite
shore, and bringing storms of rain and sleet at
intervals, this proved a very delightful ride, one
that shines in memory above all other rides I have
taken. We went at a swift gallop along the north
bank, and never had gray Patagonia looked more
soberly and sadly gray than on this afternoon.
The soil, except in places where the winter grass
had spread over it, had taken a darker brown
color from the rain it had imbibed, and the bosky
uplands a deeper gray than ever, while the whole
vast sky was stormy and dark. But after a time
the westering sun began to shine through the rifts
behind us, while before us on the wild flying clouds
appeared a rainbow with hues so vivid that we
shouted aloud with joy at the sight of such loveli-

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 51

ness. For nearly an hour we rode with this vision
of glory always before ns; grove after grove of
leafless black-barked willow-trees on our right
hand, and gray thorny hill after hill on our left,
did we pass in our swift ride, while great flocks of
upland geese continually rose up before us, with
shrill whistlings mingled with solemn deep dron-
ing cries; and the arch of watery fire still lived,
now fading as the flying wrack grew thinner and
thinner, then, just when it seemed about to vanish,
brightening once more to a new and more won-
derful splendor, its arch ever widening to greater
proportions as the sun sunk lower in the sky.

I do not suppose that the colors were really
more vivid than in numberless other rainbows I
have seen ; it was, I think, the universal grayness
of earth and heaven in that gray winter season,
in a region where color is so sparsely used by
Nature, that made it seem so supremely beautiful,
so that the sight of it affected us like wine.

The eyes, says Bacon, are ever most pleased
with a lively embroidery on a sad and somber
ground. This was taught to us by the green and
violent arch on the slaty gray vapor. But Nature
is too wise

To blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure.

The day of supernatural splendor and glory
comes only after many days that are only natural,
and of a neutral color. It is watched and waited

52

for, and when it comes is like a day of some great
festival and rejoicing — the day when peace was
made, when our love was returned, when a child
was born to us. Such sights are like certain
sounds, that not only delight us with their pure
and beautiful quality, but wake in us feelings that
we cannot fathom nor analyze. They are familiar,
yet stranger than the strangest things, with a
beauty that is not of the earth, as if a loved friend,
long dead, had unexpectedly looked back to us
from heaven, transfigured. It strikes me as
strange that, so far as we know, the Incas were
the only worshipers of the rainbow.

One evening in the autumn of the year, near the
town, I was witness of an extraordinary and very
magnificent sunset effect. The sky was clear ex-
cept for a few masses of cloud low down in the
west ; and these, some time after the sun had dis-
appeared, assumed more vivid and glowing col-
ors, while the pale yellow sky beyond became more
luminous and flame-like. All at once, as I stood
not far from the bank, looking westward across
the river, the water changed from green to an in-
tense crimson hue, this extending on both hands
as far as I could see. The tide was running out,
and in the middle of the river, where the surface
was roughened into waves by the current, it quiv-
ered and sparkled like crimson flame, while near
the opposite shore, where rows of tall Lombardy
poplars threw their shadow on the surface, it was
violet-colored. This appearance lasted for five

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 53

or six minutes, then the crimson color grew
darker by degrees until it disappeared. I have
frequently read and heard of such a phenomenon,
and many persons have assured me that they have
witnessed it "with their own eyes." But what
they have witnessed one does not know. I have
often seen the surface of water, of the ocean, or
a lake, or river, flushed with a rosy color at sunset ;
but to see, some time after sunset, the waters of
a river changed to blood and crimson fire, this
appearance lasting until the twilight drew on,
and the earth and trees looked black by contrast,
has been my lot once only on this occasion; and
I imagine that if any river on the globe was known
to take such an appearance frequently, it would
become as celebrated, and draw pilgrims as far
to see it, as Chimborazo and the Falls of Niagara.
Between the town and the sea, a distance of
about twenty miles, the valley is mostly on the
south side of the river ; on the north side the cur-
rent comes very near, and in many places washes
the upland. I visited the sea by both ways, and
rode for some distance' along the coast on both
sides of the river. North of the river the beach
was shingle and sand, backed by low sand dunes
extending away into infinitude; but on the south
side, outside the valley, a sheer stupendous preci-
pice faced the ocean. A slight adventure I had
with a condor, the only bird of that species I
met with in Patagonia, will give some idea of the
height of this sheer wall of rock. I was riding

54 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

with a friend along the cliff when the majestic
bird appeared, and swooping downwards hovered
at a height of forty feet above our heads. My
companion raised his gun and fired, and we heard
the shot rattle loudly on the stiff quills of the
broad motionless wings. There is no doubt that
some of the shot entered its flesh, as it quickly
swept down over the edge of the cliff and disap-
peared from our sight. We got off our horses,
and crawling to the edge of the dreadful cliff
looked down, but could see nothing of the bird.
Remounting we rode on for a little over a mile,
until coming to the end of the cliff we went down
under it and galloped back over the narrow strip
of beach which appears at low tide. Arrived at
the spot where the bird had been lost we caught
sight of it once more, perched at the mouth of
a small cavity in the face of the rocky wall near
the summit, and looking at that height no bigger
than a buzzard. He was far beyond the reach of
shot, and safe, and if not fatally wounded, may
soar above that desolate coast, and fight with vul-
tures and gray eagles over the carcasses of
stranded fishes and seals for half a century to
come.

Close to the mouth of the river there is a low
flat island, about half a mile in length, covered
in most part by a dense growth of coarse grass
and rushes. It is inhabited by a herd of swine;
and although these animals do not increase, they
have been able to maintain their existence for a

cZBE

x&

55

long period without diminishing in number, in
spite of the occasional great tides that flood the
whole island, and of multitudes of hungry eagles
and caranchos always on the look out for stray
sucklings. Many years ago, while some gauchos
were driving a troop of half wild cows near the
shore on the neighboring mainland, a heifer took
to the water and succeeded in swimming to the
island, where she was lost to her owner. About
a year later this animal was seen by a man who
had gone to the island to cut rushes for thatching
purposes. The cow and the pigs, to the number of
about twenty-five or twenty- six, were lying fast
asleep in a small grassy hollow where he found
them, the cow stretched out at full length on the
ground, and the pigs grouped or rather heaped
around her; for they were all apparently ambi-
tious to rest with their heads pillowed on her, so
that she was almost concealed under them. Pres-
ently one of the drove, more wakeful than his
fellows, became aware of his presence and gave
the alarm, whereupon they started up like one
animal and vanished into a rush-bed. The cow,
thus doomed to live "alone, yet not alone," was
subsequently seen on several occasions by the
rush-cutters, always with her fierce followers
grouped round her like a bodyguard. This con-
tinued for some years, and the fame of the cow
that had become the leader and queen of the wild
island pigs was spread abroad in the valley; then
a human being, who was not a " sentimentalist, "

56 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

betook himself to her little kingdom with a musket
loaded with ball, and succeeded in finding and
shooting her.

In spite of what we have been taught, it is
sometimes borne in on us that man is a little lower
than the brutes.

After hearing this incident one does not at once
sit down with a good appetite to roast beef or
swine's flesh.

CHAPTER V
A DOG IN EXILE

AT the English estate up the river, where I made
so long a stay, there were several dogs, some
of them of the common dog of no breed found
throughout Argentina, a smooth-haired animal,
varying greatly in color, but of tenest red or black ;
also differing much in size, but in a majority of
cases about as big as a Scotch colley. There were
also a few others, dogs of good breeds, and these
were specially interesting to me, because they
were not restrained nor directed in any way, nor
any use made of them in their special lines. Left
to their own devices, and to rough it with the
others, the result was rather curious. The only
one among them that had proved capable of ac-
commodating himself to the new circumstances
was a Scotch colley — a fine animal of pure blood.
The common dog of the country is a jack-of-all-
trades; a great lover of the chase, but a bad
hunter, a splendid scavenger, a good watch-dog
and vermin-killer; an indifferent sheep-dog, but
invaluable in gathering up and driving cattle.
Beyond these things which he picks up, you can
really teach him nothing useful, although with

57

58 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

considerable trouble you might be able to add a
few ornamental subjects, such as giving his paw,
and keeping guard over a coat or stick left in
his charge. He is a generalized beast, grandson
to the jackal, and first cousin to the cur of Europe
and the Eastern pariah. To this primitive, or
only slightly-improved type of dog, the colley
perhaps comes nearest of all the breeds we value ;
and when he is thrown back on nature he is "all
there, ' ' and not hindered as the pointer and other
varieties are by more deeply-rooted special in-
stincts. At all events, this individual took very
kindly to the rude life and work of his new com-
panions, and by means of his hardihood and in-
exhaustible energy, became their leader and su-
perior, especially in hunting. Above anything he
loved to chase a fox; and when in the course of
a ride in the valley one was started, he invariably
threw all the native dogs out and caught and killed
it himself. If these dogs had all together taken
to a feral life, I do not think the colley would
have been worse off than the others.

It was very different with the greyhounds.
There were four, all of pure breed; and as they
were never taken out to hunt, and could not, like
the colley, take their share in the ordinary work
of the establishment, they were absolutely useless,
and certainly not ornamental. When I first no-
ticed them they were pitiable objects, thin as
skeletons, so lame that they could scarcely walk,
and wounded and scratched all over with thorns.

A DOG IN EXILE 59

I was told that they had been out hunting on their
own account in the thorny upland, and that this
was the result. For three or four days they re-
mained inactive, sleeping the whole time, except
when they limped to the kitchen to be fed. But
day by day they improved in condition; their
scratches healed, their ribbed sides grew smooth
and sleek, and they recovered from their lame-
ness ; but scarcely had they got well before it was
discovered one morning that they had vanished.
They had gone off during the night to hunt again
on the uplands. They were absent two nights and
a day, then returned, looking even more reduced
and miserable than when I first saw them, to re-
cover slowly from their hurts and fatigue; and
when well again they were off once more ; and so
it continued during the whole time of my visit.
These hounds, if left to themselves, would have
soon perished.

Another member of this somewhat heterogene-
ous canine community was a retriever, one of the
handsomest I have ever seen, rather small, and
with a most perfect head. The extreme curliness
of his coat made him look at a little distance like
a dog cut out of a block of ebony, with the surface
carved to almost symmetrical knobbiness. Major
— that was his namfi=rwould have lent himself well
to sculpture. He was old, but not too fat, nor
inactive; sometimes he would go out with the
other dogs, but apparently he could not keep up

60 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

the pace, as after a few hours he would return
always alone, looking rather disconsolate.

I have always been partial to dogs of this breed ;
not on account of the assistance they have been
to me, but because when I have wished to have
a dog at my side I have found them more suitable
than other kinds for companions. They are not
stupid nor restless, but ready to fall in with a
quiet mood, and never irritate by a perpetual im-
patient craving for notice. A fussy, demonstra-
tive dog, that can never efface himself, I object
to: he compels your attention, and puts you in a
subordinate place: you are his attendant, not he
yours.

Major's appearance attracted me from the first,
and he, on his side, joyfully responded to my ad-
vances, and at once attached himself to me, follow-
ing me about the place as if he feared to lose
sight of me even for a minute. My host, however,
hastened to warn me not to take him with me
when I went out shooting, as he was old and blind,
and subject, moreover, to strange freaks, which
made him worse than useless. He had formerly
been an excellent retriever, he informed me, but
even in his best days not wholly to be trusted, and
now he was nothing but bad.

I could scarcely credit the blindness, as he did
not show it in his brown intelligent and wistful
eyes, and always appeared keenly alive and inter-
ested in everything going on about him; but by
experimenting I found that he could scarcely see

A DOG IN EXILE 61

further than about six inches from his nose; but
his hearing and scent were so good, and guided
him so well, that no person on a slight acquaint-
ance would have made the discovery of his de-
fective sight.

Of course, after this, I could have nothing more
to do with the retriever, further than patting him
on the head, and speaking a kind word to him
whenever he chanced to be in my way. But this
was not enough for old Major. He was a sport-
ing dog, full of energy, and with undiminished
faith in his own powers, in spite of his years, and
when a sportsman had come to the house, and had
deliberately singled him out for friendly notice,
he could not and would not believe that it was
to go no further. Day after day he clung to the
delusion that he was to accompany me in my walks
and little shooting excursions in the neighborhood ;
and every time I took down a gun he would rush
forward from his post by the door with so many
demonstrations of joy, and with such imploring
looks and gestures, that I found it very hard to
rebuke him. It was sad to have him standing
there, first cocking up one ear, then the other,
striving to pierce the baffling mists that inter-
vened between his poor purblind eyes and my
face, to find some sign of relenting in it.

It was evident that old Major was not happy,
in spite of all he had to make him so : although he
was well fed and fat, and treated with the great-
est kindness by every one on the place, and al-

62 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

though all the other dogs about the house looked
Up to him with that instinctive respect they al-
ways accord to the oldest, or strongest, or most
domineering member, his heart was restless and
dissatisfied. He could not endure an inactive life.
There was, in fact, only one way in which he could
or was allowed to work off his superabundant en-
ergy. This was when we went down to the river
to bathe in the afternoon, and when we would
amuse ourselves, some of us, by throwing enor-
mous logs and dead branches into the current.
They were large and heavy, and thrown well out
into one of the most rapid rivers in the world, but
Major would have perished forty times over, if
he had had forty lives to throw away, before he
would have allowed one of those useless logs to be
lost. But this was wasted energy, and Major
could not have known it better if he had gradu-
ated with honors at the Royal School of Mines,
consequently his exertions in the river did not
make him happy. His unhappiness began to prey
on my mind, and I never left the house but that
mute imploring face haunted me for an hour after,
until I could bear it no longer. Major conquered,
and to witness his boundless delight and grati-
tude when I shouldered my gun and called him
to me, was a pleasure worth many dead birds.
Nothing important happened during our first
few expeditions. Major behaved rather wildly, I
thought, but he was obedient and anxious to
please, and my impression was that he had been

A DOG IN EXILE 63

too long neglected, and would soon settle down
to do his share of the work in a sober, business-
like manner.

Then a day came when Major covered himself
with glory. I came one morning on a small flock
of flamingoes in a lagoon; they were standing
in the water, about seventy-five or eighty yards
from the shore, quietly dozing. Fortunately the
lagoon was bordered by a dense bed of tall rushes,
about fifteen yards in breadth, so that I was able
to approach the birds unseen by them. I crept up
to the rushes in a fever of delighted excitement;
not that flamingoes are not common in that dis-
trict, but because I had noticed that one of the
birds before me was the largest and loveliest fla-
mingo I had ever set eyes on, and I had long been
anxious to secure one very perfect specimen. I
think my hand trembled a great deal; neverthe-
less, the bird dropped when I fired ; and then how
quickly the joy I experienced was changed to
despair when I looked on the wide expanse of
mud, reeds and water that separated him from
me ! How was I ever to get him? for it is as much
as a man's life is worth to venture into one of
these long river-like lagoons in the valley, as un-
der the quiet water there is a bed of mire, soft as
clotted cream, and deep enough for a giant's
grave. I thought of Major, but not for a moment
did I believe that he, poor dog! was equal to the
task. When I fired he dashed hurriedly forward,
and came against the wall of close rushes, where

64 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

he struggled hopelessly for a little while, and then
floundered back to me. There was, however, noth-
ing else to be done. * ' Major, come here, ' ' I called,
and, taking a lump of clay I threw it as far as I
could towards the floating bird. He raised his
ears, and listened to get the right direction, and
when the splash of the stone reached us he dashed
in and against the rushes once more. After a vio-
lent struggle he succeeded in getting through
them, and, finding himself in deep water, struck
straight out, and then began swimming about in
all directions, until, getting to windward of the
bird, he followed up the scent and found it. This
was the easiest part of the task, as the bird was
very large, and when Major got back to the rushes
with it, and I heard him crashing and floundering
through, snorting and coughing as if half -suffo-
cated, I was sure that if I ever got my flamingo
at all it must be hopelessly damaged. At length
he appeared, so exhausted with his exertions that
he could hardly stand, and deposited the bird at
my feet. Never had I seen such a splendid speci-
men! It was an old cock bird, excessively fat,
weighing sixteen pounds, yet Major had brought
it out through this slough of despond without
breaking its skin, or soiling its exquisitely beauti-
ful crimson, rose-colored, and faintly-blushing
white plumage ! Had he not himself been so plas-
tered with mud and slime I should, in gratitude,
have taken him into my arms; but he appeared
very well satisfied with the words of approval I

MAJOR AND THE FLAMINGO

A DOG IN EXILE 65

bestowed on him, and we started homeward in
a happy frame of mind, each feeling well pleased
with the other — and himself.

That evening as I sat by the fire greatly enjoy-
ing my after-dinner coffee, and a pipe of the
strongest cavendish, I related the day's adven-
tures, and then for the first time heard from my
host something of Major's antecedents and re-
markable history.

He was a Scotch dog by birth, and had formerly
belonged to the Earl of Zetland, and as he proved
to be an exceptionally clever and good-looking
young dog, he was for a time thought much of;
but there was a drop of black blood in Major's
heart, and in a moment of temptation it led him
into courses for which he was finally condemned
to an ignominious death; he escaped to become a
pioneer of civilization in the wilderness, and to
show even in old age and when his sight had
failed him, of what stuff he was made. Killing
sheep was his crime; he had hunted the swift-
footed cheviots and black-faces on the hills and
moors; he had tasted their blood and had made
the discovery that it was sweet, and the ancient
wild dog instinct was hot in his heart. The new
joy possessed his whole being, and in a moment
swept away every restraint. The savage life was
the only real life after all, and what cared Major
about the greatest happiness for the greatest
number, and new fangled notions about the divi-
sion of labor, in which so mean a part was as-

66 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

signed him! Was he to spend a paltry puppy
existence retrieving birds, first flushed by a stupid
pointer or setter, and shot by a man with a gun —
the bird, after all, to be eaten by none of them;
and he, in return for his share in the work, to be
fed on mild messes and biscuits, and beef, killed
somewhere out of sight by a butcher? Away with
such a complex state of things ! He would not be
stifled by such an artificial system; he would kill
his own mutton on the moors, and eat it raw and
warm in the good old fashion, and enjoy life, as,
doubtless, every dog of spirit had enjoyed it a
thousand years ago !

This was not to be permitted on a well-conducted
estate; and as it was thought that chains and
slavery would be less endurable than death to a
dog of Major's spirit, to death he was forthwith
condemned.

Now it happened that a gentleman, hearing all
this from the earl's gamekeeper, before the dread
sentence had been executed, all at once remem-
bered that one of his friends, who was preparing
to emigrate to Patagonia, purposed taking out
some good dogs with him, and thinking that this
retriever would form an acceptable gift, he begged
for it. The gamekeeper gave it to him, and he
in turn gave it to his friend, and in this way Ma-
jor escaped the penalty, and in due time, after
seeing and doubtless reflecting much by the way,
arrived at his destination. I say advisedly that
Major probably reflected a great deal, for in his

A DOO IN EXILE 67

new home he never once gave way to his criminal
appetite for sheep 's blood ; but whenever the flock
came in his way, which was often enough, he
turned resolutely aside and skulked off out of the
sound of their bleating as quickly as possible.

All I heard from my host only served to raise
my opinion of Major, and, remembering what he
had accomplished that day, I formed the idea that
the most glorious period of his life had just
dawned, that he had now begun a series of ex-
ploits, compared with which the greatest deeds of
all retrievers in other lands would sink into insig-
nificance.

I have now to relate Major's second important
exploit, and on this occasion the birds were geese.

The upland geese are excellent eating, and it
was our custom to make an early breakfast off a
cold goose, or of any remnants left in the larder.
Cold boiled goose and coffee, often with no bread
— it sounds strange, but never shall I forget those
delicious early Patagonian breakfasts.

Now the geese, although abundant at that sea-
son, were excessively wary, and hard to kill; and
as no other person went after them, although all
grumbled loudly when there was no goose for
breakfast, I was always very glad to get a shot
at them when out with the gun.

One day I saw a great flock congregated on a
low mud bank in one of the lagoons, and immedi-
ately began to maneuver to get within shooting
distance without disturbing them. Fortunately

68 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

they were in a great state of excitement, keeping
up a loud incessant clamor, as if something very
important to the upland geese was being dis-
cussed, and in the general agitation they neglected
their safety. More geese in small flocks were con-
tinually arriving from various directions, increas-
ing the noise and excitement ; and by dint of much
going on hands and knees and crawling over rough
ground, I managed to get within seventy yards of
them and fired into the middle of the flock. The
birds rose up with a great rush of wings and noise
of screams, leaving five of their number flounder-
ing about in the shallow water. Major was quickly
after them, but two of the five were not badly
wounded, and soon swam away beyond his reach ;
to the others he was guided by the tremendous
flapping they made in the water in their death
struggles; and one by one he conveyed them, not
to his expectant master, but to a small island
about a hundred and twenty yards from the shore.
No sooner had he got them all together than, to
my unspeakable astonishment and dismay, he be-
gan worrying them, growling all the time with a
playful affectation of anger, and pulling out
mouthfuls of feathers which he scattered in clouds
over his head. To my shouts he responded by
wagging his tail, and barking a merry crisp little
bark, then flying at the dead birds again. He
seemed to be telling me, plainly as if he had used
words, that he heard me well enough, but was
not disposed to obey, that he found it very amus-

A DOG IN EXILE 69

ing playing with the geese and intended to enjoy
himself to his heart's content.

"Major! Major!" I cried, "you base ungrate-
ful dog ! Is this the way you repay me for all my
kindness, for befriending you when others spoke
evil of you, and made you keep at home, and
treated you with contemptuous neglect! Oh, you
wretched brute, how many glorious breakfasts
are you spoiling with those villainous teeth!"

In vain I stormed and threatened, and told him
that I would never speak to him again, that I
would thrash him, that I had seen dogs shot for
less than what he was doing. I screamed his name
until I was hoarse, but it was all useless. Major
cared nothing for my shouts, and went on worry-
ing the geese. At length, when he grew tired of
his play, he coolly jumped into the water and
swam back to me, leaving the geese behind. I
waited for him, a stick in my hand, burning for
vengeance, and fully intending to collar and
thrash him well the moment he reached me. For-
tunately he had a long distance to swim, and be-
fore he reached land I began to reflect that if I
received him roughly, with blows, I would never
get the geese — those three magnificent white and
maroon-colored geese that had cost me so much
labor to kill. Yes, I thought, it will be better to
dissemble and be diplomatic and receive him gra-
ciously, and then perhaps he will be persuaded to
go again and fetch the geese. In the midst of
these plans Major arrived, and sat down facing

70 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

me without shaking himself, evidently beginning
to experience some qualms of conscience.

11 Major," said I, addressing him in a mild gen-
tle voice, and patting his wet black head, "you
have treated me very badly, but I am not going to
punish you — I 'm going to give you another chance,
old dog. Now, Major, good and obedient dog, go
and fetch me the geese. ' ' With that I pushed him
gently towards the water. Major understood me,
and went in, although in a somewhat perfunctory
manner, and swam back to the island. On reach-
ing it he went up to the geese, examined them
briefly with his nose and sat down to deliberate.
I called him, but he paid no attention. With
what intense anxiety I waited his decision.

At last he appeared to have made up his mind ;
he stood up, shook himself briskly and — will it be
believed? — began to worry the geese again! He
was not merely playing with them now, and did
not scatter the feathers about and bark, but bit
and tore them in a truculent mood. When he had
torn them pretty well to pieces he swam back once
more, but this time he came to land at a long dis-
tance from me, knowing, I suppose, that I was now
past speaking mildly to him; and, skulking
through the reeds, he sneaked home by himself.
Later, when I arrived at the house, he carefully
kept out of my way.

I believe that when he went after the geese the
second time he really did mean to bring them out,
but finding them so much mutilated he thought

A DOG IN EXILE 71

that he had already hopelessly offended me, and so
concluded to save himself the labor of carrying
them. He did not know, poor brute, that his
fetching them would have been taken as a token of
repentance, and that he would have been forgiven.
But it was impossible to forgive him now. All
faith in him was utterly and for ever gone, and
from that day I looked on him as a poor degraded
creature; and if I ever bestowed a caress on his
upturned face, I did it in the spirit of a man
who flings a copper to an unfortunate beggar in
the street; and it was a satisfaction to me that
Major appeared to know what I thought of him.
But all this happened years ago, and now I can
but look with kindly feelings for the old blind re-
triever who retrieved my geese so badly. I can
even laugh at myself for having allowed an in-
eradicable anthropomorphism to carry me so far
in recalling and describing our joint adventures.
But such a fault is almost excusable in this in-
stance, for he was really a remarkable dog among
other dogs, like a talented man among his fellow-
men. I doubt if any other retriever, in such cir-
cumstances and handicapped by such an infirm-
ity, could have retrieved that splendid flamingo;
but with this excellence there was the innate ca-
pacity to go wrong, a sudden reversion to the
irresponsible wild dog — the devilry, to keep to
human terms, that sent him into exile and made
him at the last so interesting and pathetic a figure.

CHAPTER VI
THE WAR WITH NATURE

DURING my sojourn on the Rio Negro letters
and papers reached me only at rare inter-
vals. On one occasion I passed very nearly two
months without seeing a newspaper. I remember,
when at the end of that time one was put before
me, I snatched it up eagerly, and began hastily
scanning the columns, or column-headings rather,
in search of startling items from abroad, and that
after a couple of minutes I laid it down again to
listen to some one talking in the room, and that
I eventually left the place without reading the
paper at all. I suppose I snatched it up at first
mechanically, just as a cat, even when not hungry,
pounces on a mouse it sees scuttling across its
path. It was simply the survival of an old habit—
a trick played by unconscious memory on the in-
tellect, like the action of the person who has re-
sided all his life in a hovel, and who, on entering
a cathedral door or passing under a lofty arch-
way, unwittingly stoops to avoid bumping his
forehead against an imaginary lintel. I was con-
scious on quitting the room, where I had cast
aside the unread newspaper, that the old interest

72

THE WAE WITH NATURE 73

in the affairs of the world at large had in a great
measure forsaken me; yet the thought did not
seem a degrading one, nor was I at all startled at
this newly-discovered indifference, though up till
then I had always been profoundly interested in
the moves on the great political chessboard of the
world. How had I spent those fifty or sixty days,
I asked myself, and from what enchanted cup had
I drunk the oblivious draught which had wrought
so great a change in me? The answer was that I
had drunk from the cup of nature, that my days
had been spent with peace. It then also seemed
to me that the passion for politics, the perpetual
craving of the mind for some new thing, is after
all only a feverish artificial feeling, a necessary
accompaniment of the conditions we live in, per-
haps, but from which one rapidly recovers when
it can no longer be pandered to, just as a toper,
when removed from temptation, recovers a
healthy tone of body, and finds to his surprise
that he is able to exist without the aid of stimu-
lants. It is easy enough to relapse from this free
and pleasant condition; in the latter case the
emancipated man goes back to the bottle, in the
former to the perusal of leading articles and of
the fiery utterances of those who make politics
their trade. That I have never been guilty of
backsliding I cannot boast; nevertheless the les-
son nature taught me in that lonely country was
not wholly wasted, and while I was in that con-
dition of mind I found it very agreeable. I was

74 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

delighted to discover that the stimulus derived
from many daily telegrams and much discussion
of remote probabilities was not necessary to keep
my mind from lethargy. Things about which I
had hitherto cared little now occupied my thoughts
and supplied me with pleasurable excitement.
How fresh and how human it seemed to feel a
keen interest in the village annals, the domestic
life, the simple pleasures, cares, and struggles of
the people I lived with ! This is a feeling only to
be experienced in any great degree by the soul that
has ceased to vex itself with the ambitious schemes
of Eussia, the attitude of the Sublime Porte, and
the meeting or breaking up of parliaments. When
the Eastern Question had lost its ancient fascina-
tion for me I found a world large enough for my
sympathies in the little community of men and
women on the Rio Negro. Here for upwards of a
century the colony has existed, cut off, as it were,
by hundreds of desert leagues from all communion
with fellow-christians, surrounded by a great wil-
derness, waterless and overgrown with thorns,
peopled only by pumas, ostriches, and wandering
tribes of savage men. In this romantic isolation
the colonists spend their whole lives, roaming in
childhood over the wooded uplands; in after life
with one cloud always on their otherwise sunlit
horizon — the fear of the red man, and always
ready to fly to arms and mount their horses when
the cannon booms forth its loud alarm from the
fort.

THE WAR WITH NATURE 75

It must of necessity have been a case of war to
the knife with these white aliens — war not only
with the wild tribes that cherish an undying feud
against the robbers of their inheritance, but also
with nature. For when man begins to cultivate
the soil, to introduce domestic cattle, and to slay
a larger number of wild animals than he requires
for food — and civilized man must do all that to
create the conditions he imagines necessary to his
existence — from that moment does he place him-
self in antagonism with nature, and has there-
after to suffer countless persecutions at her hands.
After a century of residence in the valley the col-
onist has established his position so that he can-
not be driven out. Twenty-five years ago it was
still possible for a great cacique to gallop into
the town, clattering his silver harness and flour-
ishing his spear, to demand with loud threats of
vengeance his unpaid annual tribute of cattle,
knife-blades, indigo, and cochineal. Now the red
man's spirit is broken; in numbers and in courage
he is declining. During the last decade the desert
places have been abundantly watered with his
blood, and, before many years are over, the old
vendetta will be forgotten, for he will have ceased
to exist.

Nature, albeit now without his aid, still main-
tains the conflict, enlisting the elements, with bird,
beast, and insect, against the hated white dis-
turber, whose way of life is not in harmony with
her way.

76 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

There are the animal foes. Pumas infest the
settlement. At all seasons a few of these sly
but withal audacious robbers haunt the riverside ;
but in winter a great many lean and hungry indi-
viduals come down from the uplands to slay the
sheep and horses, and it is extremely difficult to
track them to their hiding places in the thorny
thickets overhanging the valley. I was told that
not less than a hundred pumas were killed annu-
ally by the shepherds and herdsmen. The depre-
dations of the locusts are on a much larger scale.
In summer I frequently rode over miles of ground
where they literally carpeted the earth with their
numbers, rising in clouds before me, causing a
sound as of a loud wind with their wings. It was
always the same, I was told ; every year they ap-
peared at some point in the valley to destroy the
crops and pasturage. Then there were birds of
many species and in incalculable numbers. To an
idle sportsman without a stake in the country it
was paradise. At one spot I noticed all the wheat
ruined, most of the stalks being stripped and
broken, presenting a very curious appearance; I
was surprised to hear from the owner of the
desolate fields that in this instance the coots had
been the culprits. Thousands of these birds came
up from the river every night, and in spite of all
he could do to frighten them away they had suc-
ceeded in wasting his corn.

On either side of the long straggling settlement
spreads the uninhabited desert — uninhabitable, in

UPLAND GEESE

THE WAE WITH NATURE 77

fact, for it is waterless, with a sterile gravelly soil
that only produces a thorny vegetation of dwarf
trees. It serves, however, as a breeding-place for
myriads of winged creatures ; and never a season
passes but it sends down its hungry legions of one
kind or another into the valley. During my stay
pigeons, ducks, and geese were the greatest foes
of the farmer. When the sowing season com-
menced the pigeons (Columba maculosa) came in
myriads to devour the grain, which is here sown
broadcast. Shooting and poisoning them was
practised on some farms, while on others dogs
were trained to hunt the birds from the ground;
but notwithstanding all these measures, hajf the
seed committed to the earth was devoured. When
the corn was fully ripe and ready to be harvested
then came the brown duck — Dafila spinacauda —
in millions to feast on the grain. Early in winter
the arrival of the migratory upland geese — Chloe-
phaga magellanica — was dreaded. It is scarcely
possible to keep them from the fields when the
wheat is young or just beginning to sprout; and
I have frequently seen flocks of these birds quietly
feeding under the very shadow of the fluttering
scarecrows set up to frighten them. They do
even greater injury to the pasture-lands, where
they are often so numerous as to denude the earth
of the tender young clover, thus depriving the
sheep of their only food. On some estates
mounted boys were kept scouring the plains, and
driving up the flocks with loud shouts; but their

78 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

labors were quite profitless ; fresh armies of geese
on their way north were continually pouring in,
making a vast camping ground of the valley, till
scarcely a blade of grass remained for the perish-
ing cattle.

Viewed from a distance, in comfortable homes,
this contest of man with the numberless destruc-
tive forces of nature is always looked on as the
great drawback in the free life of the settler — the
drop of bitter in the cup which spoils its taste. It
is a false notion, although it would no doubt be
upheld as true by most of those who are actually
engaged in the contest, and should know. This
is strange, but not unaccountable. Our feelings
become modified and changed altogether with re-
gard to many things as we progress in life, and
experience widens, but in most cases the old ex-
pressions are still used. We continue to call black
black, because we were taught so, and have always
called it black, although it may now seem purple
or blue or some other color. We learn a kind of
emasculated language in the nursery, from school-
masters, and books written indoors, and it has
to serve us. It proves false, but its falsity is per-
haps never clearly recognized; nature emanci-
pates us and the feeling changes, but there has
been no conscious reasoning on the matter, and
thought is vague. One hears a person relating
the struggles and storms of his early or past life,
and receiving without protest expressions of sym-
pathy and pity from his listeners; but he knows

THE WAR WITH NATUKE 79

in his heart, albeit his brain may be and generally
is in a mist, that these were the very things that
exhilarated him, that if he had missed them his
life would have been savorless. For the healthy
man, or for the man whose virile instincts have
not become atrophied in the artificial conditions
we exist in, strife of some kind, if not physical
then mental, is essential to happiness. It is a
principle of nature that only by means of strife
can strength be maintained. No sooner is any
species placed above it, or over-protected, than
degeneration begins. But about the condition of
the inferior animals, with regard to the compara-
tive dullness or brightness of their lives, we do
not concern ourselves. It is pleasant to be able
to believe that they are all in a sense happy, al-
though hard to believe that they are happy in
the same degree. The sloth, for instance, that
most over-protected mammalian, fast asleep as he
hugs his branch, and the wild cat that has to save
himself, and must for ever and always keep all
his faculties keen and brightly polished. With
regard to man, who has the power of self -analysis
and of seeing in his own mind all minds, the case
is very different, and it does concern us to know
the truth. A great deal — very many pages, chap-
ters and even books — might be written on this
subject, but to write them is happily unnecessary,
since every one can easily find out the truth from
his own experience. This will tell him which
satisfied him most in the end — the rough days or

80 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

the smooth in his life ; and which was most highly
valued — the good he struggled for or that which
came to him in some other way. Even as a child,
or as a small boy, assuming that his early years
were passed in fairly natural conditions, the
knocks and bruises and scratches and stings of in-
furiated humble bees he suffered served only to
excite a spirit that had something of conscious
power and gladness in it ; and in this the child was
father to the man. But the subject which specially
concerns me just now is the settler's life in some
new and rough district ; and as it appears that the
greatest, the most real, and in many cases the only
pleasures of such an existence are habitually
spoken of as pains, the subject is one on which
I may be pardoned for dwelling at some
length.

If Mill's doctrine be true, that all our happiness
results from delusion, that to one capable of see-
ing things as they are life must be an intolerable
burden, then it may seem only a cruel kindness to
whisper into the ear of the emigrant the warn-
ing— "That which thou goeth forth to seek thou
shalt not find."

It is not said, be it remembered, that he will
not find happiness, which, like the rain and sun-
shine, although in more moderate measure, comes
alike to all men ; it is only said that the particular
form of happiness to which he looks forward will
never be his. But one need not fear to whisper
the warning, nor even to shout it from the house-

THE WAE WITH NATURE 81

tops, for, to begin with, he will not believe nor
listen to it. His mind is fixed on the three glori-
ous prizes that lure him away — Adventure, Dis-
tinction, Gold. These bright and shining apples
are perhaps just as common at home as abroad,
and as easily gathered; but the young enthusiast,
surveying coasts five or ten thousand miles away
through his mental telescope, sees them appar-
ently hanging on very much lower branches, and
imagines that to pluck them he has only to trans-
port himself beyond the ocean. To drop this meta-
phor, adventure in that distant place will be as
common as the air he breathes, giving him much
invigorating pleasure by the way, while he ad-
vances to possess himself of other more satisfying
things. With the nimble brains, brave spirit, and
willing hands characteristic of the inhabitants
of the British Islands, he will assuredly be able
to achieve distinction — that pretty bit of rib-
bon which most men are willing enough to
wear.

This, however, is only a matter of secondary im-
portance ; the chief prize will always be the yellow
metal. Knowing how much can be done with it
at home where it is held in great esteem, he will
take care to provide himself with an abundant sup-
ply against his return. The precise way in which
it is to be acquired he will not trouble himself
about until he reaches his destination. It will per-
haps flow in upon him through business channels ;
in most cases it will be thought more agreeable to

82 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

pick it up in its native state during his walks
abroad in the forest. The simple-minded aborigi-
nes, always ready to humor an eccentric taste,
will assist him in collecting it; and, finally, for a
small consideration in the form of colored beads
and pocket-mirrors, convey it in large sacks and
hampers to the place of embarkation. It is not
meant that the immigrant in all cases paints his
particular delusion in colors bright as these; let
him shade the picture until it corresponds in tone
with his individual creation — a dream and a delu-
sion it will nevertheless remain. Not in these
things which will never be his, nor in still cherish-
ing the dream will he find his pleasure, but in
something very different.

I speak not of that large percentage of immi-
grants who are doomed to find no pleasure at all,
and no good. To the youth of ardent generous
temperament, arrived in some far-off city where
all men are free and equal, and the starched con-
ventionalities of the old world are unknown, it is
perhaps the hardest thing to believe that when he
slips down not a hand will be put forth to raise
him; that when he pronounces these common
words, "I have come to the end of my tether," in-
stantly all the smiling faces surrounding him will
vanish as if by magic; that the few sovereigns
remaining in his pocket at any time are as a chain,
shortened each day by a link, holding him back
from some terrible destiny. . . . Let us delay no
longer in this moral place of skulls, but follow

THE WAS WITH NATUEE 83

that wise and sturdy youth who, wrapping his
cloak about his face, passes unharmed through the
poisonous atmosphere of the landing-place, and
hurries a thousand miles away, while ever

Before him, like a blood-red flag,

flutters and shines the dream that lures him on.
And now at his journey's end comes reality to lay
rude hands on him with rough shaking. Mean-
while, before he has quite recovered from the
shock, that red flag on which his dreamy eyes
have been so long fixed stays not, but travels on
and on to disappear at last like a sunset cloud in
the distant horizon. He does not miss it greatly
after all. The actual is much in his thoughts.
When a man is buffeting the waves he does not
curiously examine the landscape before him and
complain that there are no bright flowers on the
trees. New experience takes the place of vanished
dreams, which, like water-lilies, blossom only on
stagnant pools. Here are none of the innumerable
appliances to secure comfort he has been used to
from infancy, regarding them almost as spontane-
ous productions of the earth ; no hand to perform
a hundred necessary offices, so that this dainty
gentleman is obliged to blacken his own boots,
tame and harness to the plow his own bullocks
or horses, kill and cook his own mutton. Nothing
is here, in fact, but harsh Nature reluctant to be
subdued; while he, to subdue her and make his

84 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

own conditions, has only a pair of soft weak
hands.

To one fresh from the softness and smoothness
of civilization, unaccustomed to manual labor, how
hard then is the lot of the settler! Behind him
physical comfort and beautiful dreams; before
him the prospect of long years of unremitting toil,
every day of which will unfit him more and more
for a return to the gentle life of the past; while,
for only result, he will have food enough to satisfy
hunger, and a rude shelter from extremes of heat
and cold, from torrents of winter rain and blinding
clouds of summer dust. Yet is he happy. For the
vanished substantial comforts and airy splendors
there is a compensation gilding his rough existence
with a better brightness than that of any hope
of future prosperity which may yet linger in his
mind. It is the feeling the settler experiences
from the moment of his induction into the desert
that he is engaged in a conflict, and there is no
feeling comparable with it to put a man on his
mettle and inspire him with a healthy and endur-
ing interest in life. To this feeling is added the
charm of novelty caused by that endless proces-
sion of surprises which nature prepares for the
pioneer — an experience unknown to the rural life
of countries that have long been under cultiva-
tion. The greatest drawbacks and difficulties en-
countered have this charm strongest in them, and
are robbed by it of half their power to discourage
the mind.

THE WAR WITH NATUEE 85

The young enthusiast, hurrying about London
to speak his farewells and look after his outfit,
will perhaps laugh at this, for his delusion is still
dear to him. But I am not discouraging him; I
am, on the contrary, telling him of a rill of pure
water out there where he is going, where, for
many years to come, he will refresh himself every
day, and learn to feel (if not to think and to say)
that it is the sweetest rill in existence.

It is rough living with unsubdued, or only par-
tially subdued, Nature, but there is a wonderful
fascination in it. The patient, leaden-footed, but
always obedient drudge, who goes forth uncom-
plainingly, albeit often with a sullen face, about
her work, day after day, year after year; who
never rebels, never murmurs against her bad task-
master Man, although sometimes the strength fails
her so that she cannot complete the appointed task
- — this is Nature at home in England. How strange
to see this stolid, immutable creature transformed
beyond the seas into a flighty, capricious thing,
that will not be wholly ruled by you, a beautiful
wayward Undine, delighting you with her origi-
nality, and most lovable when she teases most; a
being of extremes, always either in laughter or
tears, a tyrant and a slave alternately; to-day
shattering to pieces the work of yesterday; now
cheerfully doing more than is required of her;
anon the frantic vixen that buries her malignant
teeth into the hand that strikes or caresses her.
All these rapid incomprehensible changes, even

86 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

when most vexing and destructive to your plans,
interest your mind, and call up a hundred latent
energies it is a joy to discover. But you have
not yet sounded all her depths; nor can you im-
agine, seeing her frequent gay smiles, to what
length her fierce resentment may carry her.
Sometimes, as if roused to sudden frenzy at the
indignities you are subjecting her to — hacking at
her trees, turning up her cushioned soil, and
trampling down her grass and flowers — she ar-
rays herself in her blackest, most terrible aspect,
and like a beautiful woman who in her fury has no
regard for her beauty, she plucks up her noblest
trees by the roots, and scooping up the very soil
from the earth whirls it aloft to give a more hor-
rible gloom to the heavens. And darkness not be-
ing terrifying enough, she kindles up the mighty
chaos she has created into a blaze of intolerable
light, while the solid world is shaken to its foun-
dations with her wrathful thunders. When de-
struction seems about to fall on man and all his
works, when you are prostrate and ready to perish
with excessive fear, lo, the mood changes, the furi-
ous passion has spent itself, and there is no trace
left of it when you look up only to encounter her
peaceful reassuring smile. These sublime moods
are, however, infrequent and soon forgotten ; man
learns to despise the threats of a cataclysm that
never comes, and goes forth once more to level the
ancient trees, to invert the soil, and pasture his
herds on her grasses and flowers. He will sub-

THE WAR WITH NATURE 87

due the wild thing at last, but not yet ; many years
will she struggle to retain her ancient sweet su-
premacy ; he cannot alter all at once the old order
to which she clings tenaciously, as the red man
to his savage life. Her attempt to frighten him
away has failed. He laughs at her mask of ter-
rors— he knows that it is only a mask; and it
suffocates her and cannot be long endured. She
will cast it aside and fight him another way. She
will stoop to his yoke and be docile only to betray
and defeat him at the last. A thousand strange
tricks and surprises will she invent to molest him.
In a hundred forms she will buzz in his ears and
prick his flesh with stings ; she will sicken him with
the perfume of flowers, and poison him with sweet
honey; and when he lies down to rest, she will
startle him with the sudden apparition of a pair
of lidless eyes and a flickering forked tongue. He
scatters the seed, and when he looks for the green
heads to appear, the earth opens, and lo, an army
of long-faced, yellow grasshoppers come forth!
She, too, walking invisible at his side had scat-
tered her miraculous seed along with his. He
will not be beaten by her, he slays her striped and
spotted creatures; he dries up her marshes; he
consumes her forests and prairies with fire, and
her wild things perish in myriads; he covers her
plains with herds of cattle, and waving fields of
corn, and orchards of fruit-bearing trees. She
hides her bitter wrath in her heart, secretly she
goes out at dawn of day and blows her trumpet

88 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

on the hills, summoning her innumerable children
to her aid. She is hard-pressed and cries to her
children that love her to come and deliver her.
Nor are they slow to hear. From north and south,
from east and west, they come in armies of creep-
ing things and in clouds that darken the air. Mice
and crickets swarm in the fields; a thousand in-
solent birds pull his scarecrows to pieces, and
carry off the straw stumng to build their nests;
every green thing is devoured ; the trees, stripped
of their bark, stand like great white skeletons in
the bare desolate fields, cracked and scorched by
the pitiless sun. When he is in despair deliver-
ance comes ; famine falls on the mighty host of his
enemies; they devour each other and perish ut-
terly. Still he lives to lament his loss; to strive
still, unsubdued and resolute. She, too, laments
her lost children, which now, being dead, serve
only to fertilize the soil and give fresh strength
to her implacable enemy. And she, too, is unsub-
dued; she dries her tears and laughs again; she
has found out a new weapon it will take him long
to wrest from her hands. Out of many little hum-
ble plants she fashions the mighty noxious weeds ;
they spring up in his footsteps, following him
everywhere, and possess his fields like parasites,
sucking up their moisture and killing their fertil-
ity. Everywhere, as if by a miracle, is spread the
mantle of rich, green, noisome leaves, and the corn
is smothered in beautiful flowers that yield only
bitter seed and poison fruit. He may cut them

THE WAE WITH NATURE 89

down in the morning, in the night time they will
grow again. With her beloved weeds she will
wear out his spirit and break his heart; she will
sit still at a distance and laugh while he grows
weary of the hopeless struggle ; and, at last, when
he is ready to faint, she will go forth once more
and blow her trumpet on the hills and call her in-
numerable children to come and fall on and de-
stroy him utterly.

This is no mere fancy portrait, for Nature her-
self sat for it in the desert, and it is painted in true
colors. Such is the contest the settler embarks
in — so various in its fortunes, so full of great and
sudden vicissitudes, calling for so much vigilance
and strategy on his part. If the dreams he sets
out with are never realized, he is no worse off
in this respect than others. To one, born and
bred on the plains, the distant mountain range is
ever a region of enchantment ; when he reaches it
the glory is no more ; the opalescent tints and blue
ethereal shadows of noon, the violet hues of the
sunset have vanished. There is nothing after all
but a rude confusion of piled rocks ; but although
this is not what he expected, he ends by preferring
the mountain's roughness to the monotony of the
plain. The man who finishes his course by a fall
from his horse, or is swept away and drowned
when fording a swollen stream, has, in most cases,
spent a happier life than he who dies of apoplexy
in a counting-house or dining-room ; or, who, find-
ing that end which seemed so infinitely beautiful

90 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

to Leigh. Hunt (which to me seems so unutterably
hateful), drops his white face on the open book
before him. Certainly he has been less world-
weary, and has never been heard to whine and
snivel about the vanity of all things.

CHAPTER VH
LIFE IN PATAGONIA

FROM the dribbling warfare described in the
last chapter, with clouds of winged things for
principal enemy, let us go back once more to that
sterner conflict with hostile men, in which the iso-
lated little colony has so often been involved dur-
ing its century of existence. One episode from
its eventful history I wish to relate, for in this
instance the Patagonians had, for once, to oppose
a foreign and civilized foe. The story is so
strange, even in the romantic annals of South
America, as to seem almost incredible. The main
facts are, however, to be found in historical docu-
ments. The details given here were taken from
the lips of persons living on the spot, and who
had been familiar with the story from childhood.
Very early in this century the Brazilians became
convinced that in the Argentine nation they had a
determined foe to their aggressive and plunder-
ing policy, and for many years they waged war
against Buenos Ayres, putting forth all their
feeble energies in operations by land and sea to
crush their troublesome neighbor, until 1828, when
they finally abandoned the contest. During this

91

92 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

war the Imperialists conceived the idea of captur-
ing the Patagonian settlement of El Carmen,
which they knew to be quite unprotected. Three
ships of war, with a large number of soldiers, were
sent out to effect this insignificant conquest, and
in due time reached the Eio Negro. One of the
ships came to grief on the bar, which is very diffi-
cult ; and there it eventually became a total wreck.
The other two succeeded in getting safely into the
river. The troops, to the number of 500 men,
were disembarked and sent on to capture the
town, which is twenty miles distant from the sea.
The ships at the same time proceeded up the river,
though it was scarcely thought that their co-
operation would be required to take so weak a
place as the Carmen. Happily for the colonists,
the Imperial armada found the navigation difficult,
and one of the ships ran on to a sandbank about
half way to the town; the other proceeded alone
only to arrive when it was all over with the land
force. This force, finding it impossible to con-
tinue its march near the river, owing to the steep
hills intersected by valleys and ravines and cov-
ered with a dense forest of thorns, was compelled
to take a circuitous route leading it several miles
away from the water. Tidings of the approaching
army soon reached the Carmen, and all able-bodied
men within call were quickly mustered in the fort.
They numbered only seventy, but the Patagonians
were determined to defend themselves. Women
and children were brought into the fort ; guns were

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 93

loaded and placed in position; then the com-
mander had a happy inspiration, and all the
strong women were made to display themselves on
the walls in male attire. Dummy soldiers, hastily
improvised from blocks of wood, bolsters, and
other materials, were also placed at intervals;
so that when the Brazilians arrived in sight they
were surprised to see four or five hundred men,
as they thought, on the ramparts before them.
From the high ground behind the town where they
had halted they commanded a view of the river for
several miles, but the expected ships were not yet
in sight. The day had been oppressively hot, with-
out a cloud, and that march of about thirty miles
over the waterless desert had exhausted the men.
Probably they had been suffering from sea-sick-
ness during the voyage; at any rate, they were
now mad with thirst, worn out, and not in a fit
state to attack a position seemingly so strongly
defended. They determined to retire, and wait
for a day or two, and then attack the place in con-
cert with the ships. To the joy and amazement
of the Patagonians, their formidable enemy left
without firing a shot. Another happy inspiration
came to the aid of the commander, and as soon
as the Brazilians had disappeared behind the ris-
ing ground, his seventy men were hastily dis-
patched to collect and bring in all the horses pas-
turing in the valley. When the invaders had been
about three or four hours on their spiritless re-
turn march, the thunder of innumerable hoofs was

94 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

heard behind them, and looking back, they beheld
a great army, as they imagined in their terror,
charging down upon them. These were their sev-
enty foes spread in an immense half-moon, in
the hollow of which over a thousand horses were
being driven along at frantic speed. The Brazil-
ians received their equine enemy with a discharge
of musketry; but though many horses were slain
or wounded, the frantic yells of the drivers behind
still urged them on, and in a few moments, blind
with panic, they were trampling down the invad-
ers. In the meantime the Patagonians were firing
into the confused mass of horses and men ; and by
a singular chance — a miracle it was held to be at the
time — the officer commanding the Imperial troops
was shot dead by a stray bullet; then the men
threw down their arms and surrendered at dis-
cretion— 500 disciplined soldiers of the Empire to
seventy poor Patagonians, mostly farmers, trades-
men, and artisans. The honor of the Empire was
very little to those famishing wretches crying out
with frothing mouths for water instead of quar-
ter. Leaving their muskets scattered about the
plain, they were marched by their captors down
to the river, which was about four miles off, and
reached it at a point just where the bank slopes
down between the Parrot's Cliff on one side, and
the house I resided in on the other. Like a herd
of cattle maddened with thirst, they rushed into
the water, trampling each other down in their
haste, so that many were smothered, while others,

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 95

pushed too far out by the surging mass behind,
were swept from their feet by the swift current
and drowned. When they had drunk their fill,
they were driven like cattle to the Carmen and
shut up within the fort. In the evening the ship
arrived before the town, and, going a little too
near the shore on the opposite side, ran aground.
The men in her were quickly apprised of the dis-
aster which had overtaken the land force ; mean-
while the resolute Patagonians, concealed amongst
the trees on the shore, began to pepper the deck
with musket-balls; the Brazilians, in terror for
their lives, leaped into the water and swam to
land; and when darkness fell, the colonists had
crowned their brave day's work by the capture
of the Imperial war-vessel Itaparica. No doubt
it was soon pulled to pieces, good building mate-
rial being rather expensive on the Eio Negro; a
portion of the wreck, however, still lies in the
river, and often, when the tide was low, and those
old brown timbers came up above the surface,
like the gaunt fossil ribs of some gigantic Pliocene
monster, I have got out of my boat and stood
upon them experiencing a feeling of great satis-
faction. Thus the awful war-cloud burst, and the
little colony, by pluck and cunning and readiness
to strike at the proper moment, saved itself from
the disgrace of being conquered by the infamous
Empire of the tropics.

During my residence at the house alongside the
Parrot's Cliff, one of our neighbors I was very

96 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

much interested in was a man named Sosa. He
was famed for an almost preternatural keenness
of sight, had great experience of the wild life of
the frontier, and was always employed as a scout
in times of Indian warfare. He was also a cele-
brated horse-thief. His horse-stealing propensi-
ties were ineradicable, and had to be winked at on
account of his usefulness; so that he was left in
a great measure to his own devices. He was, in
fact, a fox hired to act as watch-dog to the colony
in times of danger ; and though the victims of his
numberless thefts had always been anxious to
wreak personal vengeance on him, his vulpine sa-
gacity had so far enabled him to escape them all.
My interest in him arose from the fact that he was
the son of a man whose name figures in Argen-
tine history. Sosa's father was an illiterate
gaucho — a man of the plains — possessing faculties
so keen that to ordinary beings his feats of vision
and hearing, and his sense of direction on the
monotonous pampas, seemed almost miraculous.
As he also possessed other qualities suitable to a
leader of men in a semi-savage region, he rose in
time to the command of the southwestern frontier,
where his numerous victories over the Indians
gave him so great a prestige that the jealousy of
the Dictator Rosas — the Nero of South America,
as he was called by his enemies — was roused, and
at his instigation Sosa was removed by means of
a cup of poison. The son, though in all other re-
spects a degenerate being, inherited his father's

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 97

wonderful senses. One instance of his keen-sight-
edness which I heard struck me as very curious.
In 1861 Sosa had found it prudent to disappear
for a season from the colony, and in the company
of five or six more gauchos — also offenders against
the law, who had flown to the refuge of the des-
ert— he amused himself by hunting ostriches along
the Rio Colorado. On the 12th of March the hunt-
ers were camping beside a grove of willows in
the valley, and about nine o'clock that evening,
while seated round the fire roasting their ostrich
meat, Sosa suddenly sprang to his feet and held
his open hand high above his head for some mo-
ments. l ' There is not a breath of wind blowing, ' '
he exclaimed, "yet the leaves of the trees are
trembling. What can this portend 1 ' ' The others
stared at the trees, but could see no motion, and
began to laugh and jeer at him. Presently he sat
down again, remarking that the trembling had
ceased; but during the rest of the evening he
seemed very much disturbed in his mind. He re-
marked repeatedly that such a thing had never
happened in his experience before, for, he said, he
could feel a breath of wind before the leaves felt
it, and there had been no wind; he feared that it
was a warning of some disaster about to overtake
their party. The disaster was not for them. On
that evening, when Sosa sprang up terrified and
pointed to the leaves which to the others appeared
motionless, occurred the earthquake which de-
stroyed the distant city of Mendoza, crushing

98 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

twelve thousand people to death in its fall. That
the subterranean wave extended east to the Plata,
and southwards into Patagonia, was afterwards
known, for in the cities of Bosario and Buenos
Ayres clocks stopped, and a slight shock was also
experienced in the Carmen on the Eio Negro.

My host, whose Christian name was Ventura,
being a Patagonian by birth, and not far off fifty
years old, must, I imagined, have seen a thousand
things worth relating, and I frequently impor-
tuned him to tell some of his early experiences in
the settlement. But somehow he invariably drifted
into amorous and gambling reminiscences, inter-
esting in their way, some of them, but they were
not the kind of recollections I wished to hear. The
empire of his affections had been divided between
Cupid and cards; and apparently everything he
had seen or experienced in fifty eventful years,
unless it had some relation to one of these two
divinities, was clean forgotten — cast away from
him like the ends of the innumerable cigarettes
he had been smoking all his life. Once, however,
a really interesting adventure of his boyhood was
recalled accidentally to his mind. He came home
one evening from the Carmen, where he had been
spending the day, and during supper told me the
following story.

When he was about sixteen years old he was
sent one day with four others — three lads like
himself, and a middle-aged man named Marcos in
charge of them — with a herd of horses required

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 99

for military service at a place twenty-five leagues
up the river. For, at that period, every person
was at the beck and call of the commander of the
colony. Half way to their destination there was
a corral, or cattle-enclosure, standing two or three
hundred yards from the river, but miles away
from any habitation. They drove their animals
into the corral, and, after unsaddling and turning
loose the beasts they had ridden, were about to
catch fresh horses, when a troop of Indians was
spied charging down upon them. "Follow me,
boys!" shouted Marcos, for there was no time
to lose, and away they rushed to the river, throw-
ing off their clothes as they ran. In a few mo-
ments they were in the water swimming for life,
the shouts of the savages ringing in their ears.
The river at this point was about eight hundred
feet broad, with a strong current, and two of the
lads dared not venture across, but escaped, diving
and swimming along under the shadow of the
bank like a couple of water-rats or wounded ducks,
and finally concealed themselves in a reed bed at
some distance. The others, led by Marcos, being
good swimmers like most of the Patagonians,
struck boldly out for the opposite shore. But
when they approached it and were beginning to
congratulate themselves on their escape, they
were suddenly confronted with another party of
mounted Indians, standing a few yards back from
the margin and quietly waiting their arrival. They
turned and swam away to the middle of the stream

100 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

once more : here one of them, a youth named Da-
mian, began to exclaim that he was getting tired,
and would sink unless Marcos would save him.
Marcos told him to save himself if he could ; then
Damian, bitterly reproaching him for his selfish-
ness, declared that he would swim back to the
side they had started from and give himself up
to the Indians. Naturally they made no objection,
being unable to help him; and so Damian left
them, and when the Indians saw him approaching
they got off their horses and came down to the
margin, their lances in their hands. Of course
Damian knew right well that savages seldom bur-
den themselves with a male captive when they
happen to be out on the war-path; but he was a
clever boy, and though death by steel was more
painful than death by drowning, there was still a
faint chance that his captors might have compas-
sion on him. He began, in fact, to appeal to their
mercy from the moment he abandoned his com-
panions. ''Indians! friends! brothers!" he
shouted aloud from the water. ' ' Do not kill me :
in heart I am an Indian like one of yourselves, and
no Christian. My skin is white, I know; but I hate
my own race, to escape from them has always been
my one desire. To live with the Indians I love,
in the desert, that is the only wish of my heart.
Spare me, brothers, take me with you, and I will
serve you all my life. Let me live with you, hunt
with you, fight with you — especially against the
hated Christians."

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 101

In the middle of the river Marcos lifted up his
face and laughed hoarsely to hear this eloquent
address ; though they expected to see poor Damian
thrust through with spears the very next moment,
he could not help laughing. They watched him ar-
rive, still loudly crying out for mercy, astonishing
them very much with his oratorical powers, for
Damian had not hitherto made any display of this
kind of talent. The Indians took him by the hands
and drew him out of the water, then, surrounding
him, walked him away to the corral, and from
that moment Damian disappeared from the val-
ley; for on a search being made afterwards, not
even his bones, picked clean by vultures and foxes,
could be found.

After seeing the last of their comrade, and
keeping themselves afloat with the least possible
exertion, Marcos and Ventura were carried down
the stream by the swift current till they gained a
small island in the middle of the river. With the
drift-wood found on it they constructed a raft,
binding the sticks together with long grass and
rushes, and on it they floated down stream to the
inhabited portion of the valley, and so eventually
made their escape.

The reason why my host told me this story in-
stead of one of his usual love intrigues or gam-
bling adventures was because that very day he
had seen Damian once more, just returned to the
settlement where he had so long been forgotten by
every one. Thirty years of exposure to the sun

102 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

and wind of the desert had made him so brown,
while in manner and speech he had grown so like
an Indian, that the poor amateur savage found
it hard at first to establish his identity. His rela-
tions had, however, been poor, and had long
passed away, leaving nothing for him to inherit,
so that there was no reason to discredit his
strange story. He related that when the Indians
drew him from the water and carried him back
to the corral they disagreed among themselves as
to what they should do to him. Luckily one of
them understood Spanish, and translated to the
others the substance of Damian's speech delivered
from the water. When they questioned their cap-
tive he invented many other ingenious lies, say-
ing that he was a poor orphan boy, and that the
cruel treatment his master subjected him to had
made him resolve to escape to the Indians. The
only feeling he had towards his own race, he as-
sured them, was one of undying animosity; and
he was ready to vow that if they would only let
him join their tribe he would always be ready for
a raid on the Christian settlement. To see the
entire white race swept away with fire and steel
was, in fact, the cherished hope of his heart.
Their savage breasts were touched with his pite-
ous tale of sufferings; his revengeful feelings
were believed to be genuine, and they took him to
their own home, where he was permitted to share
in the simple delights of the aborigines. They be-
longed to a tribe very powerful at that time, in-

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 103

habiting a district called Las Manzanas — that is,
the Apple Country — situated at the sources of the
Eio Negro in the vicinity of the Andes.

There is a tradition that shortly after the con-
quest of South America a few courageous Jesuit
priests crossed over from Chili to the eastern
slopes of the Andes to preach Christianity to the
tribes there, and that they took with them imple-
ments of husbandry, grain, and seeds of European
fruits. The missionaries soon met their death,
and all that remained of their labors among the
heathen were a few apple-trees they had planted.
These trees found a soil and climate so favorable,
"xat they soon began to propagate spontaneously,

coming exceedingly abundant. Certain it is that

w, after two or three centuries of neglect by
man, these wild apple-trees still yield excellent
fruit, which the Indians eat, and from which they
also make a fermented liquor they call chi-chi.

To this far-off fertile region Damian was taken
to lead the kind of life he professed to love. Here
were hill, forest, and clear swift river, great un-
dulating plains, the pleasant pasture-lands of the
huanaco, ostrich, and wild horse; and beyond all
in the west the stupendous mountain range of
the Cordilleras — a realm of enchantment and
ever-changing beauty. Very soon, however, when
the novelty of the new life had worn off, together
with the exultation he had experienced at his
escape from cruel death, his heart began to be
eaten up with secret grief, and he pined for his

104 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

own people again. Escape was impossible: to
have revealed his true feelings would have ex-
posed him to instant cruel death. To take kindly
to the savage way of life, outwardly at least, was
now his only course. With cheerful countenance
he went forth on long hunting expeditions in the
depth of winter, exposed all day to bitter cold and
furious storms of wind and sleet, cursed and
beaten for his awkwardness by his fellow-hunts-
men; at night stretching his aching limbs on the
wet stony ground, with the rug they permitted
him to wear for only covering. When the hunters
were unlucky it was customary to slaughter a
horse for food. The wretched animal would be
first drawn up by its hind legs and suspended
from the branches of a great tree, so that all the
blood might be caught, for this is the chief deli-
cacy of the Patagonian savage. An artery would
be opened in the neck and the spouting blood
caught in large earthen vessels; then, when the
savages gathered round to the feast, poor Damian
would be with them to drink his share of the ab-
horred liquid, hot from the heart of the still living
brute. In autumn, when the apples were fer-
mented in pits dug in the earth and lined with
horse hides to prevent the juice from escaping, he
would take part, as became a true savage, in the
grand annual drinking bouts. The women would
first go round carefully gathering up all knives,
spears, bolas, or other weapons dangerous in the
hands of drunken men, to carry them away into

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 105

the forest, where they would conceal themselves
with the children. Then for days the warriors
would give themselves up to the joys of intoxica-
tion; and at such times unhappy Damian would
come in for a large share of ridicule, blows, and
execrations; the Indians being full of boisterous
fun or else truculent in their cups, and loving
above all things to have a Koko-huinche, or
''white fool" for a butt.

At length, when he came to man's estate, was
fluent in their language, and outwardly in all
things like a savage, a wife was bestowed on him,
and she bore him several children. Those he had
first known as grown up or old men gradually died
off, were killed, or drifted away; children who
had always known Damian as one of the tribe
grew to manhood, and it was forgotten that he
had ever been a Christian and a captive. Yet
still, with his helpmate by his side, weaving rugs
and raiment for him or ministering to his wants—
for the Indian wife is always industrious and the
patient, willing, affectionate slave of her lord —
and with all his young barbarians at play on the
grass before his hut, he would sit in the waning
sunlight oppressed with sorrow, dreaming the old
dreams he could not banish from his heart. And
at last, when his wife began to grow wrinkled and
dark-skinned, as a middle-aged Indian mother in-
variably does, and when his children were becom-
ing men, the gnawing discontent at his breast
made him resolve to leave the tribe and the life he

106 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

secretly hated. He joined a hunting-party going
towards the Atlantic coast, and after traveling
for some days with them his opportunity came,
when he secretly left them and made his way alone
to the Carmen.

* ' And there he is, ' ' concluded Ventura, when he
had told the story, with undisguised contempt for
Damian in his tone, "an Indian and nothing less!
Does he imagine he can ever be like one of us
after living that life for thirty years? If Marcos
were alive, how he would laugh to see Damian
back again, sitting cross-legged on the floor,
solemn as a cacique, brown as old leather, and
calling himself a white man! Yet here he says
he will remain, and here amongst Christians he
will die. Fool, why did he not escape twenty
years ago, or, having remained so long in the
desert, why has he now come back where he is not
wanted ! ' '

Ventura was very unsympathetic, and appeared
to have no kindly feelings left for his old com-
panion-in-arms, but I was touched with the story
I had heard. There was something pathetic in
the life of that poor returned wanderer, an alien
now to his own fellow-townsmen, homeless amidst
the pleasant vineyards, poplar groves, and old
stone houses where he had first seen the light;
listening to the bells from the church tower as he
had listened to them in childhood, and perhaps for
the first time realizing in a dull vague kind of
way that it might never more be with him as it

DAMIAX 'S WIFE

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 107

had been in the vanished past. Possibly also, the
memory of his savage spouse who had loved him
many years would add some bitterness to his
strange isolated life. For, far away in their old
home, she would still wait for him, vainly hoping,
fearing much, dim-eyed with sorrow and long
watching, yet never seeing his form returning to
her out of the mysterious haze of the desert.
Poor Damian, and poor wife !

CHAPTER VHI

SNOW, AND THE QUALITY OF
WHITENESS

IN August, the April of the Argentine poets, we
had some piercingly cold weather, followed by
a fall of snow. Heaven be praised for it! for
never again, perhaps, shall I see earth transfig-
ured by the breath of antarctic winter. I had
spent the night in the village, and it was a strange
and weirdly beautiful sight, when, on rising next
morning, I beheld roads, housetops, trees, and the
adjacent hills, white with a surpassing unfamiliar
whiteness. The morning was mild, with a dull
leaden sky ; and suddenly, as I stood in the street,
the snow began to fall again, and continued for
about an hour. Most of that time I spent standing
motionless, gazing up into the air, peopled with
innumerable large slow-descending flakes : only
those of my English readers who, like Kingsley,
have longed for a sight of tropical vegetation and
scenery, and have at last had their longing grati-
fied, can appreciate my sensations on first behold-
ing snow.

My visit to Patagonia so far had been rich in
experiences. One of the first, just before touch-

108

SNOW, AND QUALITY OF WHITENESS 109

ing its shores, but after the ship had struck on
the hidden rocks, was the effect of whiteness as
seen in a tumultuous milky sea; and now, after
several months there came this snow-fall, and a
vaster and stranger whiteness. My uppermost
feeling at the time was one of delight at seeing
what I had been hoping for months to see, but had
now, when winter was so nearly over, ceased to
hope for. This pleasure was purely intellectual;
but when I ask myself if there was anything be-
sides, a deeper, undefinable feeling, I can only
answer, I think not : my first experience of snow
does not lead me to believe that there is any
instinctive feeling in us related to it; that the
feeling which so many, perhaps a majority of per-
sons, experience on seeing the earth whitened by
the breath of winter, must be accounted for in
some other way.

In Herman Melville's romance of Moby Dick,
or The Whale, there is a long dissertation, per-
haps the finest thing in the book, on whiteness in
nature, and its effect on the mind. It is an inter-
esting and somewhat obscure subject; and, as
Melville is the only writer I know who has dealt
with it, and something remains to be said, I may
look to be pardoned for dwelling on it at some
length in this place.

Melville recalls the fact that in numberless nat-
ural objects whiteness enhances beauty, as if it
imparted some special virtue of its own, as in
marbles, japonicas, pearls; that the quality of

110 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

whiteness is emblematic of whatever we regard as
high and most worthy of reverence; that it has
for us innumerable beautiful and kindly associa-
tions. "Yet," he goes on to say, "for all these
accumulated associations with whatever is sweet,
and honorable, and sublime, there lurks an illusive
something in the innermost idea of this hue which
strikes more of panic to the soul than the red-
ness which affrights in blood." He is no doubt
right that there is a mysterious illusive something
affecting us in the thought of whiteness ; but, then,
so illusive is it, and in most cases so transient in
its effect, that only when we are told of it do we
look for and recognize its existence in us. And
this only with regard to certain things, a distinc-
tion which Melville failed to see, this being his
first mistake in his attempt to ' ' solve the incanta-
tion of whiteness." His second and greatest
error is in the assumption that the quality of
whiteness, apart from the object it is associated
with, has anything extranatural or supernatural
to the mind. There is no " supernaturalism in
the hue," no " spectralness over the fancy," in the
thought of the whiteness of white clouds; of the
white horses of the sea; of white sea-birds, and
white water-fowl, such as swans, storks, egrets,
ibises, and many others ; nor in white beasts, not
dangerous to us, wild or domestic, nor in white
flowers. These may bloom in such profusion as to
whiten whole fields, as with snow, and their white-
ness yet be no more to the fancy than the yellows,

SNOW, AND QUALITY OF WHITENESS 111

purples, and reds of other kinds. In the same
way the whiteness of the largest masses of white
clouds has no more of supernaturalness to the
mind than the blueness of the sky and the green-
ness of vegetation. Again, on still hot days on the
pampas the level earth is often seen glittering
with the silver whiteness of the mirage ; and this
is also a common natural appearance to the mind,
like the whiteness of summer clouds, of sea foam,
and of flowers.

From all these examples, and many others
might be added, it seems evident that the "illusive
something," which Melville found in the inner-
most idea of this hue — a something that strikes
more of panic to the soul than the redness which
affrights in blood — does not reside in the quality
of whiteness itself.

After making this initial mistake, he proceeds
to name all those natural objects which, being
white, produce in us the various sensations he
mentions, mysterious and ghostly, and in various
ways unpleasant and painful. What is it, he asks,
that in the albino so peculiarly repels and shocks
the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his
own kith and kin? He has a great deal to say of
the polar bear, and the white shark of the tropical
seas, and concludes that it is their whiteness that
makes them so much more terrible to us than
other savage rapacious creatures that are dan-
gerous to man. He speaks of the muffled rolling
of a milky sea; the rustlings of the festooned

112 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

frost of mountains; the desolate shif tings of the
windrowed snows of prairies. Finally, he asks,
whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic
phantom over the soul at the bare mention of a
White Sea, a White Squall, White Mountains,
etc., etc.

He assumes all along that the cause of the feel-
ing, however it may differ in degree and other-
wise, according to the nature and magnitude of
the subject, is one and the same in all cases, that
the cause is in the whiteness, and not in the object
with which that quality is associated.

The albino case need not detain us long; and
here Melville's seafaring experiences might have
suggested a better explanation. Sailors, I am con-
vinced from observation, are very primitive in
their impulses, and hate, and often unite in per-
secuting, a companion who, owing to failing
strength or some physical defect, is not able to
do his share of the work. Savages and semi-bar-
barous people often cherish a strong animosity
against a constantly ailing, crippled, or otherwise
defective member of the community : and albinism
is associated with weakness of vision, and other
defects, which might be a sufficient cause of the
aversion. Even among the highly civilized and
humane, the sight of sickness is probably always,
in some measure, repulsive and shocking, espe-
cially in cases in which the skin loses its natural
color, such as ana?mia, consumption, chlorosis, and
jaundice. This natural and universal cause of dis-

SNOW, AND QUALITY OF WHITENESS 113

like of the albino would be strengthened among
pure savages by the superstitious element — the
belief that the abnormal paleness of the individual
was supernatural, that want of color signified
absence of soul.

As to the white shark of the tropics, the sim-
plest explanation of the greater terror inspired by
this creature would be that, being white, and
therefore conspicuous above all other dangerous
creatures, the sight would be more attracted to it,
its image would become more fixed, and look
larger and more formidable in the mind, and it
would be more often thought about apprehen-
sively, with the result that there would be a pre-
disposition to regard it with a fear exceeding that
inspired by other creatures equally or even more
dangerous to human life, but inconspicuously col-
ored, hence not so vividly seen, and creating no
such distinct and persistent mental image. Let us
consider what would be the effect of the appear-
ance of a M'arrior, habited in snowy white, or
shining gold, or vivid scarlet, or flame-color,
among a host of contending men, fighting in the
old fashion with sword and spear and battle-ax,
all clothed and armored in dull neutral or somber
colors. Wherever he appeared every eye would
be attracted to him; his movements and actions
would be followed with intense interest by all, and
by his antagonists with keen apprehension ; every
time he parried a blow aimed at his life he would
appear invulnerable to the lookers on, and when-

114 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

ever an enemy went down before him it would
seem that a supernatural energy nerved his arm,
that the gods were fighting on his side. So great
is the effect of mere conspicuousness ! Any white
savage beast would, because of its whiteness, or
conspicuousness, seem more dangerous than an-
other; and a Chillingham bull, no doubt, inspires
more fear in a person exposed to attack than a
red or black bull. On the other hand, sheep and
lambs, although their washed fleeces look whiter
than snow, are regarded as indifferently as rab-
bits and fawns, and their whiteness is nothing
to us.

Something more remains to be said about white-
ness in animals, which must come later. It will be
more in order to speak first of the whiteness of
snow, and the whiteness of a seething ocean. We
are all capable of experiencing something of that
feeling, so powerfully described by Melville, at
the sight of the muffled rollings of a milky sea,
and white mountains, and the desolate shiftings of
windrowed snows on vast stretches of level earth.
But doubtless in many the feeling would be slight ;
there is an "illusive something" in us when we
behold the earth suddenly whitened with snow;
but the feeling does not last, and is speedily for-
gotten, or else set down as an effect of mere nov-
elty. In Melville it was very strong; it stirred
him deeply, and caused him to ponder with awe
on its meaning; and the conclusion he came to
was that it is an instinct in us — an instinct simi-

SNOW, AND QUALITY OF WHITENESS 115

lar to that of the horse with regard to the smell
of some animal which has the effect of violently
agitating it. He calls it an inherited experience.
"Nor, in some things," he says, "does the com-
mon hereditary experience of all mankind fail to
bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. ' '
Finally, the feeling speaks to us of appalling
things in a remote past, of unimaginable desola-
tions, and stupendous calamities overwhelming
the race of man.

It is a sublime conception, adequately ex-
pressed ; and as we read the imagination pictures
to us the terrible struggle of our hardy barbarous
progenitors against the bitter killing cold of the
last glacial period; but the picture is vague, like
striving human figures in a landscape half oblit-
erated by wind-driven snow. It was a struggle that
endured for long ages, until the gigantic white
phantom, from which men sought everywhere to
fly, came to be a phantom of the mind, a spec-
tralness over the fancy, and instinctive horror,
which the surviving remnant transmitted by in-
heritance down to our own distant times.

It is more than likely that cold has been one of
the oldest and deadliest enemies to our race;
nevertheless, I reject Melville's explanation in
favor of another, which seems more simple and
satisfactory — to its author, at all events : which is,
that that mysterious something that moves us at
the sight of snow springs from the animism that
exists in us, and our animistic way of regarding

116 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

all exceptional phenomena. The mysterious feel-
ings produced in us by the sight of a snow-whit-
ened earth are not singular, but are similar in
character to the feelings caused by many other
phenomena, and they may be experienced, al-
though in a very slight degree, almost any day
of our lives, if we live with nature.

It must be explained that animism is not used
here in the sense that Tyler gives it in his Primi-
tive Culture: in that work it signifies a theory of
life, a philosophy of primitive man, which has
been supplanted among civilized people by a more
advanced philosophy. Animism here means not a
doctrine of souls that survive the bodies and ob-
jects they inhabit, but the mind's projection of
itself into nature, its attribution of its own sen-
tient life and intelligence to all things — that
primitive universal faculty on which the animistic
philosophy of the savage is founded. When our
philosophers tell us that this faculty is obsolete
in us, that it is effectually killed by ratiocination,
or that it only survives for a period in our chil-
dren, I believe they are wrong, a fact which they
could find out for themselves if, leaving their
books and theories, they would take a solitary
walk on a moonlit night in the "Woods of Wester-
main," or any other woods, since all are en-
chanted.

Let us remember that our poets, who speak
not scientifically but in the language of passion,
when they say that the sun rejoices in the sky and

SNOW, AND QUALITY OF WHITENESS 117

laughs at the storm; that the earth is glad with
flowers in spring, and the autumn fields happy;
that the clouds frown and weep, and the wind
sighs and "utters something mournful on its
way" — that in all this they speak not in metaphor,
as we are taught to say, but that in moments of
excitement, when we revert to primitive condi-
tions of mind, the earth and all nature is alive
and intelligent, and feels as we feel. When, after
a spell of dull weather, the sun unexpectedly
shines out warm and brilliant, who has not felt in
that first glad instant that all nature shared his
conscious gladness? Or, in the first hours of a
great bereavement, who has not experienced a
feeling of wonder and even resentment at the
sight of blue smiling skies and a sun-flushed
earth?

"We have all," says Vignoli, "however unac-
customed to give an account of our acts and func-
tions, found ourselves in circumstances which pro-
duced the momentary personification of natural
objects. The sight of some extraordinary phenom-
enon produces a vague sense of some one acting
with a given purpose." Not assuredly of "some
one" outside of and above the natural phenom-
enon, but in and one with it, just as the act of a
man proceeds from him, and is the man.

It is doubtless true that wTe are animistic to
this extent only at rare moments, and in excep-
tional circumstances, and during certain aspects
iDf nature that recur only at long intervals. And

118 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

of all such aspects of nature and extraordinary
phenomena, snow is perhaps the most impressive,
and is certainly one of the most widely known on
the earth, and most intimately associated in the
mind with the yearly suspension of nature's be-
neficent activity, and all that this means to the
human family — the failure of food and consequent
want, and the suffering and danger from intense
cold. This traditional knowledge of an inclement
period in nature only serves to intensify the ani-
mism that finds a given purpose in all natural phe-
nomena, and sees in the whiteness of earth the
sign of a great unwelcome change. Change not
death, since nature's life is eternal; but its sweet
friendly warmth and softness have died out of it ;
there is no longer any recognition, any bond;
and if we were to fall down and perish by the
wayside, there would be no compassion: it is sit-
ting apart and solitary, cold and repelling, its
breath suspended, in a trance of grief or passion ;
and although it sees us it is as though it saw us
not, even as we see pebbles and withered leaves
on the ground, when some great sorrow has dazed
us, or when some deadly purpose is in our heart.
Just as with regard to snow the animistic feel-
ing is strongest in those who inhabit regions
where winter is severe, and who annually see this
change in nature, so the "muffled rollings of a
milky sea" will strike more of panic to the sailor's
soul than to that of the landsman. Melville re-
lates an anecdote of an old sailor who swooned

SNOW, AND QUALITY OF WHITENESS 119

from terror at the sight of an ocean white with
the foam of breakers among which the ship was
driven. He afterwards declared that it was not
the thought of the danger, for to danger he was
accustomed, but the whiteness of the sea that
overcame him. And to his animistic mind that
whiteness was nothing but the sign of ocean's
wrath — the sight of its tremendous passion and
deadly purpose proved too appalling.

There is no doubt that the conditions of the
sailor's life tend to bring out and strengthen the
latent animism that is in all of us ; the very ship
he navigates is to his mind alive and intelligent,
how much more the ocean, which, even to lands-
men on each return to it after an interval, seems
no mere expanse of water, but a living conscious
thing. It was only my strangeness to the sea
which prevented the sight of its whiteness from
affecting me profoundly : animism in me is strong-
est with regard to terrestrial phenomena, with
which I am more familiar.

To return, before concluding this chapter, to
the subject of white animals. And first a word or
two concerning the great polar bear: is it not
probable that the extreme fear it inspires, which
is said by those who have encountered this animal
to exceed greatly that which is experienced at
the sight of other savage beasts that are danger-
ous to man, is due to its association with the
death-like repellent whiteness and desolation of
polar scenery?

120 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

With regard to abnormal whiteness in animals
that are familiar to us, the sight always affects us
strangely, even in so innocent and insignificant a
creature as a starling, or blackbird, or lapwing.
The rarity, conspicuousness, and abnormality in
color of the object are scarcely enough to account
for the intensity of the interest excited. Among
savages the distinguishing whiteness is sometimes
regarded as supernatural: and this fact inclines
me to believe that, just as any extraordinary phe-
nomenon produces a vague idea of some one act-
ing with a given purpose, so in the case of the
white animal, its whiteness has not come by acci-
dent and chance, but is the result of the creature 's
volition and the outward sign of some excellence
of the intelligent soul distinguishing it from its
fellows. In Patagonia I heard of a case bearing
on this point. On the plain some thirty miles east
of Salinas Grandes, in a small band of ostriches
there appeared one pure white individual. Some
of the Indians, when out hunting, attempted its
capture, but they soon ceased to chase it, and it
was called thereafter the god of the ostriches, and
it was said among them that some great disaster,
perhaps death, would overtake any person who
should do it harm.

CHAPTER IX
IDLE DAYS

"DEFORE the snow, which has given rise to so
U long a digression, had quite ceased falling the
blue sky was smiling again, and I set forth on my
muddy walk home. Under the brilliant sun the
white mantle very soon began to exhibit broad
black lines and rents, and in a brief space of time
the earth had recovered its wonted appearance
— the cheerful greenish-bluish-gray, which is Na-
ture 's livery at all times in this part of Patagonia ;
while from the dripping thorn bushes the birds
resumed their singing.

If the birds of this region do not excel those of
other lands in sweetness, compass, and variety
(and I am not sure that they do not) for constancy
in singing they indubitably carry the palm. In
spring and early summer their notes are inces-
sant ; and the choir is then led by that incompara-
ble melodist, the white-banded mocking-bird, a
summer visitor. Even in the coldest months of
winter, June and July, when the sun shines, the
hoarse crooning of the spotted Columba, resem-
bling that of the wood-pigeon of Europe, and the
softer, more sigh-like lamentations of the Zenaida

121

122 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

maculata, so replete with wild pathos, are heard
from the leafless willows fringing the river.
Meanwhile, in the bosky uplands, one hears the
songs of many passerine species; and always
amongst them, with lively hurried notes, the black-
headed Magellanic siskin. The scarlet-breasted
or military starling sings on the coldest days and
during the most boisterous weather: nor can the
rainiest sky cheat the gray finches, Diuca minor,
of their morning and evening hymns, sung by
many individuals in joyous concert. The common
mocking-bird is still more indefatigable, and
sheltering himself from the cold blast continues
till after dark warbling out snatches of song from
his inexhaustible repertory; his own music being
apparently necessary as food and air to his exist-
ence.

Warm lovely days succeeded the snowfall. Ris-
ing each morning I could reverently exclaim with
the human singer,

O gift of God! O perfect day!
Whereon should no man work but play.

Days windless and serene to their very end, bright
with a cloudless sky, and sunshine sweet and
pleasant to behold, making the gray solitudes
smile as if conscious of the heavenly influence. It
is a common saying in this country that "once
in a hundred years, a man dies in Patagonia."
I do not think any other region of the globe can

IDLE DAYS 123

boast of a saying to equal that; though it has
been ill-naturedly suggested that the proverb
might owe its origin to the fact that most people
in Patagonia meet with some violent end. I do
not myself believe there is any climate in the
world to compare with the winter of the east coast
of Patagonia; and although its summer might
seem disagreeable to some persons on account of
the violent winds that prevail at that season, the
atmosphere at all times is so dry and pure as to
make pulmonary complaints unknown. A wealthy
tradesman of the town told me that from boyhood
he suffered from weak lungs and asthma; in
search of health he left his country, Spain, and
settled in Buenos Ayres, where he formed ties
and entered into business. But his old enemy
found him there; his asthma became worse and
worse, and at last, on his doctor's recommenda-
tion, he went on a visit to Patagonia, where in a
short time he was restored to complete health —
such health as he had never previously known.
He went back rejoicing to Buenos Ayres, only to
fall ill again and to find his life growing a burden
to him. Finally, in desperation, he sold his busi-
ness and went back to the only country where
existence was possible ; and when I knew him he
had been permanently settled there for about
fourteen years, during which time he had enjoyed
the most perfect health.

But he was not happy. He confided to me that
he had purchased health at a very heavy cost,

124 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

since he found it impossible ever to accommodate
himself to such a rude existence; that he was es-
sentially a child of civilization, a man of the pave-
ment, whose pleasure was in society, in newspa-
pers, the play, and in the cafe where one meets
one's friends of an evening and has a pleasant
game of dominoes. As these things which he
valued were merely dust and ashes to me, I did
not sympathize deeply with his discontent, nor
consider that it mattered much which portion of
the globe he made choice of for a residence. But
the facts of his case interested me ; and if I should
have a reader who has other ideals, who has felt
the mystery and glory of life overcoming his soul
with wonder and desire, and who bears in his
system the canker of consumption which threatens
to darken the vision prematurely — to such a one
I would say, TRY PATAGONIA. It is far to travel,
and in place of the smoothness of Madeira there
would be roughness; but how far men go, into
what rough places, in search of rubies and ingots
of gold; and life is more than these.

During this beautiful weather merely to exist
has seemed to me a sufficient pleasure : sometimes
rowing on the river, which is here about nine
hundred feet wide — going up to the town with
the tide and returning with the current when
only a slight exertion suffices to keep the boat
swiftly gliding over the pure green water. At
other times I amuse myself by seeking for the

IDLE DAYS 125

resinous gum, known here by its Indian name
tnaken. The scraggy wide-spreading bush, a kind
of juniper, it is found on, repays me with many a
scratch and rent for all the amber tears I steal.
The gum is found in little lumps on the under side
of the lower branches, and is, when fresh, semi-
transparent and sticky as bird-lime. To fit it for
use the natives make it into pellets, and hold it
on the point of a stick over a basin of cold water ;
a coal of fire is then approached to it, causing
it to melt and trickle down by drops into the
basin. The drops, hardened by the process, are
then kneaded with the fingers, cold water being
added occasionally, till the gum becomes thick and
opaque like putty. To chew it properly requires
a great deal of practice, and when this indigenous
art has been acquired a small ball of maken may
be kept in the mouth two or three hours every
day, and used for a week or longer without losing
its agreeable resinous flavor or diminishing in
bulk, so firmly does it hold together. The maken-
chewer, on taking the ball or quid from his mouth,
washes it and puts it by for future use, just as
one does with a tooth-brush. Chewing grim is not
merely an idle habit, and the least that can be said
in its favor is that it allays the desire for excessive
smoking — no small advantage to the idle dwellers,
white or red, in this desert land ; it also preserves
the teeth by keeping them free from extraneous
matter, and gives them such a pearly luster as I
have never seen outside of this region.

126 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

My own attempts at chewing maken have, so
far, proved signal failures. Somehow the gum
invariably spreads itself in a thin coat over the
interior of my mouth, covering the palate like a
sticking-plaster and enclosing the teeth in a stub-
born rubber case. Nothing will serve to remove
it when it comes to this pass but raw suet, vigor-
ously chewed for half an hour, with occasional
sips of cold water to harden the delightful mix-
ture and induce it to come away. The culmina-
tion of the mess is when the gum spreads over
the lips and becomes entangled in the hairs that
overshadow them ; and when the closed mouth has
to be carefully opened with the fingers, until these
also become sticky and hold together firmly as if
united by a membrane. All this comes about
through the neglect of a simple precaution, and
never happens to the accomplished masticator,
who is to the manner born. When the gum is
still fresh occasionally it loses the quality of stiff-
ness artificially imparted to it, and suddenly, with-
out rhyme or reason, retransforms itself into the
raw material as it came from the tree. The adept,
knowing by certain indications when this is about
to happen, takes a mouthful of cold water at the
critical moment, and so averts a result so dis-
couraging to the novice. Maken-chewing is a
habit common to everybody throughout the entire
territory of Patagonia, and for this reason I have
described the delightful practice at some length.

When disinclined for gum-chewing I ramble for

IDLE DAYS 127

hours through the bushes to listen to the birds,
learning their language and making myself fa-
miliar with their habits. How coy are some spe-
cies whose instincts ever impel them to conceal-
ment! What vigilance, keen and never relaxed,
is theirs ! Difficult even to catch a passing glimpse
of them as they skulk from notice, how much more
so to observe them disporting themselves without
fear or restraint, unconscious of any intrusive
presence ! Yet such observation only satisfies the
naturalist, and when obtained it amply repays the
silence, the watching, and the waiting it costs.
In some cases the opportunities are so rare that
whilst they are being sought, and without ever
actually occurring, the observer day by day grows
more familiar with the manners of the wild crea-
tures that still succeed in eluding his sight.

Now the little cock (Ehinocrypa lanceolata), an
amusing bird that lives on the ground, carries its
tail erect and looks wonderfully like a very small
bantam, has spied me, and, full of alarm, utters
his loud chirrup from an adjacent bush. Gently I
steal towards him, careful to tread on the sand,
then peer cautiously into the foliage. For a few
moments he scolds me with loud, emphatic tones,"
and then is silent. Fancying him still in the
same place, I walk about the bush many times,
striving to catch sight of him. Suddenly the loud
chirrup is resumed in a bush a stone 's-throw
away; and soon, getting tired of this game of
hide-and-seek, in which the bird has all the fun

128 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

and I all the seeking, I give it up and ramble on.
Then, perhaps, the measured, deep, percussive
tones of the subterranean Ctenomys, well named
oculto in the vernacular, resound within a dozen
yards of my feet. So near and loud do they sound,
I am convinced the shy little rodent has ventured
for a moment to visit the sunshine. I might pos-
sibly even catch a momentary glimpse of him,
sitting, trembling at the slightest sound, turning
his restless bright black eyes this way and that to
make sure that no insidious foe is lurking near.
For while the mole's eyes have dwindled to mere
specks, a dark subterranean life has had a con-
trary effect on the oculto' s orbs, and made them
large, although not so large as in some cave-
rodents. On tiptoe, scarcely breathing, I ap-
proach the intervening bush and peep round it,
only to find that he has already vanished! A
hillock of damp, fresh sand, bearing the impress
of a tail and a pair of little feet, show that he
has been busy there, and had sat only a moment
ago swelling the silky fur of his bosom with those
deep, mysterious sounds. Cautiously, silently, I
had approached him, but the subtle fox and the
velvet-footed cat would have drawn near with
still greater silence and caution, yet he would
have baffled them both. Of all shy mammals he is
the shyest ; in him fear is never overcome by curi-
osity, and days, even weeks, may now elapse be-
fore I come so near seeing the Ctenomys magel-
lanica again.

\

CTEXOMYS MAGELLANICA

IDLE DAYS 129

It is near sunset, and, hark! as I ramble on I
hear in the low scrub before me the crested tina-
mous (Calodromas elegans), the wild fowl of this
region, and in size like the English pheasant, just
beginning their evening call. It is a long, sweetly
modulated note, somewhat flute-like, and sounding
clear and far in the quiet evening air. The covey
is a large one, I conjecture, for many voices are
joined in the concert. I mark the spot and walk
on; but at my approach, however quiet and
masked with bushes it may be, one by one the shy
vocalists drop their parts. The last to cease re-
peats his note half a dozen times, then the con-
tagion reaches him and he too becomes silent. I
whistle and he answers; for a few minutes we
keep up the duet, then, aware of the deception, he
is silent again. I resume my walk and pass and
repass fifty times through the scattered scrub,
knowing all the time that I am walking about
amongst the birds, as they sit turning their fur-
tive eyes to watch my movements, yet concealed
from me by that wonderful adaptive resemblance
in the color of their plumage to the sear grass
and foliage around them, and by that correlated
instinct which bids them sit still in their places.
I find many evidences of their presence — prettily
mottled feathers dropped when they preened their
wings, also a dozen or twenty neat circular hol-
lows scooped in the sand in which they recently
dusted themselves. There are also little chains of
footprints running from one hollow to the other;

130 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

for these pulverizing pits serve the same birds
every day, and, there being more birds in the
covey than there are pits, the bird that does not
quickly secure a place doubtless runs from pit to
pit in search of one unoccupied. Doubtless there
are many pretty quarrels too; and the older,
stronger bird, regular in the observance of this
cleanly luxurious habit, must, per fas et nefas, find
accommodation somewhere.

I leave the favored haunt, but when hardly a
hundred yards away the birds resume their call
in the precise spot I have just quitted; first one
and then two are heard, then twenty voices join
in the pleasing concert. Already fear, and emo-
tion strong but transitory in all wild creatures,
has passed from them, and they are free and
happy as if my wandering shadow had never
fallen across them.

Twilight comes and brings an end to these use-
less researches; useless, I say, and take great
delight in saying it, for if there is anything one
feels inclined to abhor in this placid land, it is the
doctrine that all our investigations into nature
are for some benefit, present or future, to the
human race.

Night also brings supper, welcome to the hun-
gry man, and hours of basking in the genial light
and warmth of a wood fire, I on one side, and my
bachelor host on the other. The smoke curls up
from our silent lips, whilst idle reveries possess
our minds — fit termination of a day spent as we

CALODROMAS ELEGAXS

DOLICHOTIS PATAGONICA

IDLE DAYS 131

have spent it : for my host is also an idler, only a
more accomplished one than I can ever hope to be.

We read little; my companion has never learnt
letters, and I, less fortunate in that respect, hav-
ing only been able to discover one book in the
house, a Spanish Libro de Misa, beautifully
printed in red and black letters, and bound in
scarlet morocco. I take this book and read, until
he, tired of listening to prayers, however beauti-
ful, challenges me to a game of cards. For some
time we could not hit on anything to play for,
cigarettes being common property, but at length
we thought of stories, the loser of most games
during the evening to tell the other a story, as a
mild soporific, after retiring. My host invariably
won, which was not very strange, for he had been
a professional gambler most of his days, and
could deal himself the killing cards every time he
shuffled. More than once I caught him in the very
act, for he despised his antagonist and was care-
less, and lectured him on the immorality of cheat-
ing at cards, even when we were only playing for
love, or for something next door to it. My stric-
tures amused his Patagonian mind very much ; he
explained that what I called cheating was only a
superior kind of skill acquired by much study and
long practice ; so it happened that every night I
was compelled to draw on my memory or inven-
tion for stories to pay my losses.

Only at night one feels the winter here, but in
September one knows that it has gone, though

132

summer birds have not yet returned, nor the for-
est of dwarf mimosas burst into brilliant yellow
bloom. Through all seasons the general aspect
of nature remains the same, owing to the gray
undeciduous foliage of the tree and shrub vegeta-
tion covering the country.

As spring advances each day dawns apparently
more brilliantly beautiful than the preceding one,
and after breakfast I roam forth, unencumbered
with gun, in search of recreation.

Hard by my residence there is a hill called the
"Parrots' Cliff," where the swift current of the
river, altering its course, has eaten into the shore
till a sheer smooth precipice over a hundred feet
high has been formed. In ancient times the sum-
mit must have been the site of an Indian village,
for I am continually picking up arrow-heads here ;
at present the face of the cliff is inhabited by a
flock of screaming Patagonian parrots, that have
their ancestral breeding-holes in the soft rock. It
is also haunted by a flock of pigeons that have
taken to a feral life, by one pair of little hawks
(Falco sparverius), and a colony of purple mar-
tins; only these last have not yet returned from
their equatorial wanderings. Quiet reigns along
the precipice when I reach it, for the vociferous
parrots are away feeding. I lie down on my
breast and peer over the edge ; far, far beneath me
a number of coots are peacefully disporting them-
selves in the water. I take a stone the bigness of
my hand, and, poising it over the perilous rim,

IDLE DAYS 133

drop it upon them: down, down, down it drops;
oh, simple, unsuspecting coots, beware! Splash
it falls in the middle of the flock, sending up a
column of water ten feet high, and then what a
panic seizes on the birds ! They tumble over as if
shot, dive down incontinently, then reappearing,
pause not to look about them, but spring away
with all that marvelous flutter and splutter of
which coots alone are capable; the wings beating
rapidly, the long legs and lobed feet sprawling
behind or striking the surface, away they scud,
flying and tumbling over the water, spreading
needless alarm through flocks of pin-tails, shrill-
voiced widgeons, and stately black-necked swans,
but never pausing until the opposite shore of the
river is reached.

Pleased with the success of my experiment, I
quit the precipice, to the great relief of the blue
pigeons and of the little hawks ; these last having
viewed my proceedings with great jealousy, for
they have already taken possession of a hole in
the rock with a view to nidification.

Further on in my rambles I discover a nest of
the large black leaf -cutting ant (CEcodoma) found
over the entire South American continent — and a
leading member of that social tribe of insects of
which it has been said that they rank intellectually
next to ourselves. Certainly this ant, in its ac-
tions, simulates man's intellect very closely, and
not in the unpleasant manner of species having
warrior castes and slaves. The leaf-cutter is

134 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

exclusively agricultural in its habits, and con-
structs subterranean galleries, in which it stores
fresh leaves in amazing quantities. The leaves
are not eaten, but are cut up into small pieces and
arranged in beds: these beds quickly become
frosted over with a growth of minute fungus ; this
the ant industriously gathers and stores for use,
and when the artificial bed is exhausted the with-
ered leaves are carried out to make room for a
layer of fresh ones. Thus the GEcodoma literally
grows its own food, and in this respect appears to
have reached a stage beyond the most highly de-
veloped ant communities hitherto described. An-
other interesting fact is that, although the leaf-
cutters have a peaceful disposition, never show-
ing resentment except when gratuitously inter-
fered with, they are just as courageous as any
purely predatory species, only their angry emo-
tions and warlike qualities always appear to be
dominated by reason and the public good. Occa-
sionally a community of leaf -cutters goes to war
with a neighboring colony of ants of some other
species; in this, as in everything else, they seem
to act with a definite purpose and great delibera-
tion. Wars are infrequent, but in all those I have
witnessed — and I have known this species from
childhood — the fate of the nation is decided in
one great pitched battle. A spacious bare level
spot of ground is chosen, where the contending
armies meet, the fight raging for several hours
at a stretch, to be renewed on several consecutive

IDLE DAYS 135

days. The combatants, equally sprinkled over a
wide area, are seen engaged in single combat or in
small groups, while others, non-fighters, run
briskly about removing the dead and disabled
warriors from the field of battle.

Perhaps some reader, who has made the ac-
quaintance of nature in a London square, will
smile at my wonderful ant story. Well, I have
smiled too, and cried a little, perhaps, when, wit-
nessing one of these "decisive battles of the
world, ' ' I have thought that the stable civilization
of the CEcodoma ants will probably continue to
flourish on the earth when our feverish dream of
progress has ceased to vex it. Does that notion
seem very fantastical ? Might not such a thought
have crossed the mind of some priestly Peruvian,
idly watching the labors of a colony of leaf -cutters
— a thousand years ago, let us say, before the
canker had entered into his system to make it,
long ere the Spaniard came, ripe for death? His-
tory preserves one brief fragment which goes to
show that the Incas themselves were not alto-
gether enslaved by the sublime traditions they
taught the vulgar; that they also possessed, like
philosophic moderns, some conception of that im-
placable power of nature which orders all things,
and is above Viracocha and Pachacamac and the
majestic gods that rode the whirlwind and tem-
pest, and had their thrones on the everlasting
peaks of the Andes. Five or six centuries have
probably made little change in the economy of the

136 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

(Ecodoma, but the splendid civilization of the chil-
dren of the sun, albeit it bore on the face of it the
impress of unchangeableness and needless dura-
tion, has vanished utterly from the earth.

To return from this digression. The nest I
have discovered is more populous than London,
and there are several roads diverging from it,
each one four or five inches wide, and winding
away hundreds of yards through the bushes.
Never was any thoroughfare in a great city fuller
of busy hurrying people than one of these roads.
Sitting beside one, just where it wound over the
soft yellow sand, I grew tired of watching the
endless procession of little toilers, each one carry-
ing a leaf in his jaws ; and very soon there came
into my ear a whisper from somebody —

Who finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

It is always pleasant to have even a hypothet-
ical somebody on whom to shuffle the responsibil-
ity of our evil actions. Warning my conscience
that I am only going to try a scientific experiment,
one not nearly so cruel as many in which the pious
Spallanzani took great delight, I scoop a deep pit
in the sand; and the ants, keeping on their way
with their usual blind, stupid sagacity, tumble
pell-mell over each other into it. On, on they
come, in scores and in hundreds, like an endless
flock of sheep jumping down a pit into which tk»

IDLE DAYS 137

crazy bell-wether has led the way: soon the hun-
dreds have swelled to thousands, and the yawning
gulf begins to fill with an inky mass of wriggling,
biting, struggling ants. Every falling leaf -cutter
carries down a few grains of treacherous sand
with it, making the descent easier, and soon the pit
is full to overflowing. In five minutes more they
will all be out again at their accustomed labors,
just a little sore about the legs, perhaps, where
they have bitten one another, but no worse for
their tumble, and all that will remain of the dread-
ful cavern will be a slight depression in the soil.
Satisfied with the result, I resume my solitary
ramble, and by-and-by coming upon a fine Escan-
dalosa bush I resolve to add incendiarism to my
list of misdeeds. It might appear strange that a
bush should be called Escandalosa, which means
simply Scandalous, or, to prevent mistakes, which
simply means Scandalous ; but this is one of those
quaint names the Argentine peasants have be-
stowed on some of their curious plants — dry love,
the devil's snuff-box, bashful weed, and many
others. The Escandalosa is a wide-spreading
shrub, three to five feet high, thickly clothed with
prickly leaves, and covered all the year round
with large pale-yellow immortal flowers; and the
curious thing about the plant is that when touched
with fire it blazes up like a pile of wood shavings,
and is immediately consumed to ashes with a mar-
velous noise of hissing and crackling. And thus

138 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

the bush I have found burns itself up on my plac-
ing a lighted match at its roots.

I enjoy the spectacle amazingly while it lasts,
the brilliant tongues of white flame darting and
leaping through the dark foliage making a very
pretty show; but presently, contemplating the
heap of white ashes at my feet where the green
miracle, covered with its everlasting flowers, flour-
ished a moment ago, I began to feel heartily
ashamed of myself. For how have I spent my
day? I remember with remorse the practical joke
perpetrated on the simple-minded coots, also the
consternation caused to a whole colony of indus-
trious ants ; for the idler looks impatiently on the
occupations of others, and is always glad of an
opportunity of showing up the futility of their
labors. But what motive had I in burning this
flowering bush that neither toiled nor spun, this
slow-growing plant, useless amongst plants as I
amongst my fellow-men? Is it not the fact that
something of the spirit of our simian progenitors
survives in us still? Who that has noticed mon-
keys in captivity — their profound inconsequent
gravity and insane delight in their own unreason-
ableness— has not envied them their immunity
from cold criticism? That intense relief which
all men, whether grave or gay, experience in es-
caping from conventional trammels into the soli-
tude, what is it, after all, but the delight of going
back to nature, to be for a time, what we are al-
ways pining to be, wild animals, unconfined mon-

IDLE DAYS 139

keys, with nothing to restrain us in our gambols,
and with only a keener sense of the ridiculous to
distinguish us from other creatures?

But what, I suddenly think, if some person in
search of roots and gums, or only curious to know
how a field naturalist spends his days, gunless
in the woods, should be secretly following and
watching me all the time ?

I spring up alarmed, and cast my eyes rapidly
around me. Merciful heavens! what is that sus-
piciously human-looking object seventy yards
away amongst the bushes'? Ah, relief inexpres-
sible, it is only the pretty hare-like Dolichotis
patagonica sitting up on his haunches, gazing at
me with a meek wonder in his large round timid
eyes.

The little birds are bolder and come in crowds,
peering curiously from every twig, chirping and
twittering with occasional explosions of shrill de-
risive laughter. I feel myself blushing all over
my face; their jeering remarks become intoler-
able, and, owl-like, I fly from their persecutions to
hide myself in a close thicket. There, with gray-
green curtains about and around me, I lie on a
floor of soft yellow sand, silent and motionless as
my neighbor the little spider seated on his geo-
metric web, till the waning light and the flute of
the tinamou send me home to supper.

CHAPTER X
BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA

SUMMER, winter and spring, it was an unfail-
ing pleasure in Patagonia to listen to the
singing of the birds. They were most abundant
where the cultivated valley with its groves and
orchards was narrowest, and the thorny wilder-
ness of the upland close at hand; just as in Eng-
land small birds abound most where plantations
of fruit trees exist side by side with or near to
extensive woods and commons. In the first there
is an unfailing supply of insect food, the second
affords them the wild cover they prefer, and they
pass frequently from one to the other. At a dis-
tance from the river birds were not nearly so
abundant, and in the higher uplands a hundred
miles from the coast they were very scarce.

When the idle fit was on me it was my custom
to ramble in the bushy lands away from the river,
especially during the warm spring weather, when
there were some fresh voices to be heard of mi-
grants newly arrived from the tropics, and the
songs of the resident species had acquired a
greater vigor and beauty. It was a pleasure sim-
ply to wander on and on for hours, moving cau-

140

BIED MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 141

tiously among the bushes, pausing at intervals to
listen to some new note; or to hide myself and
sit or lie motionless in the middle of a thicket,
until the birds forgot or ceased to be troubled at
my presence. The common resident mocking-bird
was always present, each bird sitting motionless
on the topmost spray of his favorite thorn, at
intervals emitting a few notes, a phrase, then
listening to the others.

But there was one bitter drop in my sweet cup.
It vexed my mind and made me almost unhappy
to think that travelers and naturalists from
Europe, whose works were known to me, were
either silent or else said very little (and that
mostly depreciatory) of the bird music that was
so much to me. Darwin's few words were espe-
cially remembered and rankled most in my mind,
because he was the greatest and had given a good
deal of attention to bird life in southern South
America. The highest praise that he gave to a
Patagonian songster was that it had "two or
three pleasant notes"; and of the Calandria mock-
ing-bird, one of the finest melodists in La Plata,
he wrote that it was nearly the only bird he had
seen in South America that regularly took its
stand for the purpose of singing; that it was re-
markable for possessing a song superior to that
of any other kind, and that its song resembled that
of the sedge warbler!

Speaking of British species, I do not think it
could be rightly said that the song of the sedge

142 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

warbler resembles that of the song-thrush. I do
think that the thrush's song often resembles that
of the mocking-bird referred to, also that it would
scarcely be an exaggeration to say that all the
music of the song-thrush might be taken out of the
Calandria mocking-bird's performance and not be
very greatly missed.

The desire to say something on this subject was
strong in me at that time, for, leaving aside the
larger question of the bird music of South Amer-
ica, I could not help thinking that these observers
had missed the chief excellence of the songsters
known to me. But I had no title to speak ; I had
not heard the nightingale, song-thrush, blackbird,
skylark, and all the other members of that famous
choir whose melody has been a delight to our race
for so many ages; I was without the standard
which others had, and being without it, could not
be absolutely sure that a mistake had been made,
and that the opinion I had formed of the melo-
dists of my own district was not too high. Now
that I am familiar with the music of British song-
birds in a state of nature the case is different, and
I can express myself on the subject without fear
and without doubt. But I have no intention of
speaking in this place of the South American bird
music I know, comparing it with that of England.
And this for two reasons. One is that I have
already written on this subject in Argentine
Ornithology and The Naturalist in La Plata. The
second reason is because bird music, and, indeed,

CALAXDRIA MOCKIXG-BIRD

BIED MUSIC IN SOUTH AMEEICA 143

bird sounds generally, are seldom describable.
We have no symbols to represent such sounds on
paper, hence we are as powerless to convey to
another the impression they make on us as we are
to describe the odors of flowers. It is hard, per-
haps, to convince ourselves of this powerlessness ;
in my case the saddening knowledge was forced
on me in such a way that escape was impossible.
No person at a distance from England could have
striven harder than I did, by inquiring of those
who knew and by reading ornithological works, to
get a just idea of the songs of British birds. Yet
all my pains were wasted, as I found out after-
wards when I heard them, and when almost every
song came to me as a surprise. It could not have
been otherwise. To name only half a dozen of the
lesser British melodists : the little jets of brilliant
melody spurted out by the robin; the more sus-
tained lyric of the wren, sharp, yet delicate; the
careless half-song half -recitative of the common
warbler; the small fragments of dreamy aerial
music emitted by the wood wren amidst the high
translucent foliage ; the hurried, fantastic medley
of liquid and grating sounds of the reed warbler;
the song, called by some a twitter, of the swallow,
in which the quick, upleaping notes seem to dance
in the air, to fall more than one at a time on the
sense, as if more than one bird sang, spontaneous
and glad as the laughter of some fairy-like, unim-
aginable child — who can give any idea of such
sounds as these with such symbols as words! It

144 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

is easy to say that a song is long or short, varied
or monotonous, that a note is sweet, clear, mellow,
strong, weak, loud, shrill, sharp, and so on; but
from all this we get no idea of the distinctive
character of the sound, since these words describe
only class, or generic qualities, not the specific and
individual. It sometimes seems to help us, in
describing a song, to give its feeling, when it
strikes us as possessing some human feeling, and
call it joyous, glad, plaintive, tender, and so on;
but this is, after all, a rough expedient, and, often
as not, misleads. Thus, in the case of the nightin-
gale, I had been led by reading to expect to hear a
distinctly plaintive song, and found it so far from
plaintive that I was swayed to the opposite ex-
treme, and pronounced it (with Coleridge) a glad
song. But by-and-by I dismissed this notion as
equally false with the other; the more I listened
the more I admired the purity of sound in some
notes, the exquisite phrasing, the beautiful con-
trasts ; the art was perfect, but there was no pas-
sion in it all — no human feeling. Feeling of some
un-human kind there perhaps was, but not glad-
ness, such as we imagine in the skylark's song,
and certainly not sorrow, nor anything sad.
Again, when we listen to a song that all have
agreed to call "tender," we perhaps recognize
some quality that faintly resembles, or affects us
like, the quality of tenderness in human speech or
vocal music ; but if we think for a moment, we are
convinced that it is not tenderness, that the effect

BIED MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 145

is not quite the same; that we have so described
it only because we have no suitable word; that
there is really no suggestion of human feeling
in it.

The old method of spelling bird notes and
sounds still finds favor with some easy-going
naturalists, and it is possible that those who use it
do actually believe that the printed word repre-
sents some avian sound to the reader, and that
those who have never heard the sound can by this
simple means get an idea of it; just as certain
arbitrary marks or signs on a sheet of written
music represent human sounds. It is fancy and a
delusion. We have not yet invented any system
of arbitrary signs to represent bird sounds, nor
are we likely to invent such a system, because, in
the first place, we do not properly know the
sounds, and, owing to their number and character,
cannot properly know more than a very few of
them; and, in the second place, because they are
different in each species : and just as our human
notation represents solely our human specific
sounds, so a notation of one bird's language, that
of the skylark, let us say, would not apply to the
language of another species, the nightingale, say,
on account of the difference in quality and timbre
of the two.

One cause of the extreme difficulty of describing
bird sounds so as to give anything approaching
to a correct idea of them, lies in the fact that in
most of them, from the loudest — the clanging

146 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

scream or call that may be heard a distance of two
or three miles — to the faintest tinkling or lisping
note that might be emitted by a creature no bigger
than a fly, there is a certain aerial quality which
makes them differ from all other sounds. Doubt-
less several causes contribute to give them this
character. There is the great development of the
vocal organ, which makes the voice, albeit finer,
more far-reaching than that of other creatures of
equal size or larger. The body in birds is less
solid ; it is filled with air in the bones and feathers,
and acts differently as a sounding board ; further-
more, the extremely distensible oesophagus, al-
though it has no connection with the trachea, is
puffed out with swallowed air when the bird emits
its notes, and this air, both when retained and
when released, in some way affects the voice.
Then, again, the bird sings or calls, as a rule,
from a greater elevation, and does not sit squat,
like a toad, on his perch, but being lifted above
it on his slender legs, the sounds he emits acquire
a greater resonance.

There are bird sounds which may be, and often
are, likened to other sounds ; to bells, to the clang-
ing produced by blows on an anvil, and to various
other metallic noises; and to strokes on tightly-
drawn metal strings; also to the more or less
musical sounds we are able to draw from wood
and bone, and from vessels of glass by striking
them or drawing the moistened finger-tips along
their rims. There are also sounds resembling

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 147

those that are uttered by mammalians, as bellow-
ings, lowings, bleatings, neighings, barkings, and
yelpings. Others simulate the sounds of various
musical instruments, and human vocal sounds, as
of talking, humming a tune, whistling, laughing,
moaning, sneezing, coughing, and so on. But in
all these, or in a very large majority, there is an
airy resonant quality which tells you, even in a
deep wood, in the midst of an unfamiliar fauna,
that the new and strange sound is uttered by a
bird. The clanging anvil is in the clouds; the
tinkling bell is somewhere in the air, suspended on
nothing; the invisible human creatures that
whistle, and hum airs, and whisper to one another,
and clap their hands and laugh, are not bound,
like ourselves, to earth, but float hither and
thither as they list.

Something of this aerial character is acquired
by other sounds, even by the most terrestrial,
when heard at a distance in a quiet atmosphere.
And some of our finer sounds, as those of the
flute and bugle and flageolet, and some others,
when heard faintly in the open air, have the airy
character of bird notes ; with this difference, that
they are dim and indistinct to the sense, while
the bird's note, although so airy, is of all sounds
the most distinct.

Mr. John Burroughs, in his excellent Impres-
sions of some British Song Birds, has said, that
many of the American songsters are shy wood-

148 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

birds, seldom seen or heard near the habitations
of man, while nearly all the British birds are
semi-domesticated, and sing in gardens and or-
chards; that this fact, in connection with their
more soft and plaintive voices, made American
song birds seem less to the European traveler
than his own. This statement would hold good,
and even gain in force, if for North America we
should substitute the hot or larger part of South
America, or of the Neotropical region, which com-
prises the whole of America south of the Isthmus
of Tehuantepec. Throughout the tropical and
subtropical portions of this region, which is vastly
richer in species than the northern half of the
continent, the songsters certainly do not, like
those of Europe, mass themselves about the habi-
tations of men, as if sweet voices were given to
them solely for the delectation of human listeners :
they are preeminently birds of the wild forest,
marsh, and savannah, and if one of their chief
merits has been overlooked, it is because the Euro-
pean naturalist and collector, whose object is to
obtain many specimens, and some new forms, has
no time to make himself acquainted with the life
habits and faculties of the species he meets with.
Again, bird life is extremely scarce in some places
within the tropics, and in the deep forest it is
often wholly absent. Of British Guiana, Mr. im
Thurn writes, "The almost entire absence of
sweet bird-notes at once strikes the traveler who
comes from thrush and warbler-haunted temperate

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 149

lands." And Bates says of the Amazonian for-
ests, "The few sounds of birds are of that pen-
sive and mysterious character which intensifies
the feeling of solitude rather than imparts a sense
of life and cheerfulness."

It is not only this paucity of bird life in large
tracts of country which has made the tropics seem
to the European imagination a region " where
birds forget to sing, ' ' and has caused many trav-
elers and naturalists to express so poor an opinion
of South American bird music. There remains in
most minds something of that ancient notion that
brilliant-plumaged birds emit only harsh disagree-
able sounds — the macaw and the peacock are ex-
amples; while the sober-colored birds of temper-
ate regions, especially of Europe, have the gift of
melody; that sweet notes are heard in England,
and piercing cries and grating screams within the
tropics. As a fact the dull-plumaged species in
the hot regions greatly outnumber those that are
gaily-colored. To mention only two South Ameri-
can passerine families, the woodhewers and ant-
birds, numbering together nearly five hundred
species, or as many as all the species of birds in
Europe, are with scarcely an exception sober-
colored. The melodious goldfinch, yellow bunt-
ing, linnet, blue tit, chaffinch, and yellow wagtail,
would look very gay and conspicuous among them.
Yet these sober-colored tropical birds I have men-
tioned are not singers.

It must also be borne in mind that South Amer-

150 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

ica embraces a great variety of climates ; that all
the vast region, which comprises Chili, the south-
ern half of Argentina, and Patagonia, is in the
temperate zone. Also, that a large proportion of
the South American songsters belong to families
that are universal, in which all the finest voices of
Europe are included — thrushes, warblers, wrens,
larks, finches. The true thrushes are well repre-
sented, and some differ but slightly from Euro-
pean forms — the whistle of the Argentine black-
bird is sometimes mistaken by Englishmen for
that of the smaller home bird. The mocking-birds
form a group of the same family (Turdidae), but
with more highly-developed vocal powers. It is
true that the tanagers, numbering about four hun-
dred species, mostly brilliantly-colored, some
rivaling the humming-birds in the vivid tints and
metallic luster of their plumage, form an exclu-
sively Neotropical family; but they are closely
related to the finches, and in the genera in which
these two great and melodious families touch and
mingle, it is impossible to say of many species
which are finches and which tanagers. Another
purely American family, with a hundred and
thirty known species, a large majority adorned
with rich or brilliant or gay and strongly-con-
trasted colors, are the troupials — Icteridse; and
these are closely related to the starlings of the
Old World.

Finally, it may be added that the true melodists
of the Neotropical region — the passerine birds of

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 151

the sub-order Oscines, which have the developed
vocal organ — number about twelve hundred spe-
cies:— a big fact when it is remembered that of
the five hundred species of birds in Europe, only
two hundred and five at the most are classed as
songsters, inclusive of fly-catchers, corvine birds
and many others which have no melody.

It is clear then, from these facts and figures,
that South America is not wanting in songsters,
that, on the contrary, it surpasses all other re-
gions of the globe of equal extent in number of
species.

It only remains to say something on another
matter — namely, the character and value of the
music. And here the reader might think that I
have got myself into a quandary, since I began
by complaining of the unworthy opinion expressed
by European writers of the melodists of my coun-
try, and at the same time disclaimed any inten-
tion of attempting to describe their melody my-
self, comparing it with that of England. For-
tunately for my purpose, not all the travelers in
South America, whose words carry weight, have
turned a deaf or unappreciative ear to the bird
music of the great bird continent : there are not-
able exceptions; from these I shall proceed to
quote a few passages in support of my contention,
beginning with Felix de Azara, a contemporary
of Buffon, and concluding with the two most illus-
trious travelers of our own day who have visited
South America — Wallace and Bates.

152 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Of Darwin it need only be added that his words
on the subject of the songs of birds are so few and
of so little value that it is probable that this kind
of natural melody gave him little or no pleasure.
It is not unusual to meet with those who are abso-
lutely indifferent to it, just as there are others
who are not pleasurably moved by human music,
vocal or instrumental.

In Spain Azara had been familiar from child-
hood with the songsters of Europe, and in Para-
guay and La Plata he paid great attention to the
language of the species he describes. In his ever
fresh Apuntamientos he says, ' ' They are mistaken
who think there are not as many and as good song-
sters here as in Europe ' ' ; and in the introduction
to the same work, referring to Buff on 's opinion
concerning the inferiority of the American song-
sters, he writes: "But if a choir of singers were
selected in the Old World, and .compared with
one of equal number gathered in Paraguay, I am
not sure which would win the victory." Of the
house-wren of La Plata (Troglodytes furvus),
Azara says that its song is "in style comparable
to that of the nightingale, although its phrases
are not so delicate and expressive; nevertheless
I count it among the first singers." This opinion
(with Daines Barrington's misleading table in my
mind) made me doubt the correctness of his judg-
ment, or memory, the wren in question being an
exceedingly cheerful singer; but when I came to
hear the nightingale, about whose song I had

BIED MUSIC IN SOUTH AMEEICA 153

formed so false an idea, it seemed to me that
Azara was not far out. Nothing here surprised
me more than the song of the British wren — a
current of sharp high unshaded notes, so utterly
different to the brilliant joyous and varied lyric
of his near relation in that distant land.

The melodious wren family counts many genera,
rich in species, throughout the Neotropical region :
and just as in that continent the thrushes have
developed a more varied and beautiful music in
the mocking-birds, so it has been with this family
in such genera as Thyothorus and Cyphorhinus,
which include the celebrated flute-birds and organ-
birds of tropical South America. D'Orbigny, in
the Voyage dans I'Amerique Meridionals, speaks
rapturously of one of these wrens, perched on a
bough overhanging the torrent, where its rich
melodious voice seemed in strange contrast to the
melancholy aspect of its surroundings. Its voice,
he says, which is not comparable to anything we
have in Europe, exceeds that of the nightingale
in volume and expression. Frequently it sounds
like a melody rendered by a flute at a great dis-
tance ; at other times its sweet and varied cadences
are mingled with clear piercing tones and deep
throat-notes. We have really no words, he con-
cludes, adequate to express the effects of this song,
heard in the midst of a nature so redundant, and
of mountain scenery so wild and savage.

Mr. Simson, in his Travels in the Wilds of Ecua-
dor, writes quite as enthusiastically of a species

154 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

of Cyphorhinus common in that country. It was
the mellowest, most beautiful bird music he had
ever heard; the song was not quite the same in
all individuals, and in tone resembled the most
sweet-sounding flute; the musical correctness of
the notes was astonishing, and made one imagine
the sounds to be produced by human agency.

Even more valuable is the testimony of Bates,
one of the least impressible of the savants who
have resided in tropical South America; yet his
account of the bird is not less fascinating than
that of D'Orbigny. "I frequently heard," he
writes, "in the neighborhood of these huts the re-
ale jo, or organ-bird (Cyphorhinus cantans), the
most remarkable songster by far of the Amazonian
forest. When its singular notes strike the ear for
the first time the impression cannot be resisted
that they are produced by a human voice. Some
musical boy must be gathering fruits in the
thicket, and is singing a few notes to cheer him-
self. The tones become more fluty and plaintive ;
they are now those of a flageolet, and notwith-
standing the utter impossibility of the thing, one
is for a moment convinced that some one is play-
ing that instrument. ... It is the only songster
which makes an impression on the natives, who
sometimes rest their paddles whilst traveling in
their small canoes, along the shady by-paths, as
if struck by the mysterious sound." The sound
must be wonderful indeed to produce such an
effect !

CYPHOKHIXUS CANTANS

BIED MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 155

To finish with quotations, the following sensible
passage from Wallace's Amazon and Rio Negro
should help us greatly in getting rid of an ancient
error : ' ' We are inclined to think that the general
statement, that the birds of the tropics have a
deficiency of song proportionate to their brilliancy
of plumage, requires to be modified. Many of the
brilliant birds of the tropics belong to families or
groups which have no song; but our most bril-
liantly-colored birds, as the goldfinch and canary,
are not less musical, and there are many beautiful
little birds here which are equally so. We heard
notes resembling those of the blackbird and robin,
and one bird gave forth three or four sweet plain-
tive notes that particularly attracted our atten-
tion; while many have peculiar cries, in which
words may be traced by the fanciful, and which
in the stillness of the forest have a very pleasing
effect."

To return, before concluding, to Azara 's remark
about a choir of birds selected in Paraguay. It
seems to me that when the best singers of any two
districts have been compared and a verdict ar-
rived at, something more remains to be said. The
dulcet strains of a few of the most highly-esteemed
songsters contribute only a part, by no means the
largest part, of the pleasure we receive from the
bird sounds of any district. All natural sounds
produce agreeable sensations in the healthy: the
patter of rain on the forest leaves, the murmur of
the wind, the lowing of kine, the dash of waves on

156 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

the beach; and so, coining to birds, the piercing
tones of the sand piper, and wail of the curlew;
the cries of passing migrants ; the cawing of rooks
in the elms, and hooting of owls, and the startling
scream of the jay in the wood, give us pleasure,
scarcely less than that produced by the set song
of any melodist. There is a charm in the infinite
variety of bird sounds heard in the forests and
marshes of southern South America, where birds
are perhaps most abundant, exceeding that of
many monotonously melodious voices ; the listener
would not willingly lose any of the indescribable
sounds emitted by the smaller species, nor the
screams and human-like calls, or solemn deep
boomings and drummings of the larger kinds, or
even the piercing shrieks which may be heard
miles away. Those tremendous voices, that never
break the quiet and almost silence of an English
woodland, affect us like the sight of mountains,
and torrents, and the sound of thunder and of
billows breaking on the shore; we are amazed at
the boundless energy and overflowing joy of wild
bird life. The bird-language of an English wood
or orchard, made up in most part of melodious
tones, may be compared to a band composed en-
tirely of small wind instruments with a limited
range of sound, and which produces no storms of
noise, eccentric flights, and violent contrasts, nor
anything to startle the listener — a sweet but some-
what tame performance. The South American
forest has more the character of an orchestra, in

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 157

which a countless number of varied instruments
take part in a performance in which there are
many noisy discords, while the tender spiritual
tones heard at intervals seem, by contrast, in-
finitely sweet and precious.

CHAPTER XI
SIGHT IN SAVAGES

TN Patagonia I added something to my small
•*• stock of private facts concerning eyes — their
appearance, color, and expression — and vision,
subjects which have had a mild attraction for me
as long as I can remember. When, as a boy, I
mixed with the gauchos of the pampas, there was
one among them who greatly awed me by his
appearance and character. He was distinguished
among his fellows by his tallness, the thickness
of his eyebrows and the great length of his crow-
black beard, the form and length of his facon, or
knife, which was nothing but a sword worn knife-
wise, and the ballads he composed, in which were
recounted, in a harsh tuneless voice to the strum-
strum of a guitar, the hand-to-hand combats he
had had with others of his class — fighters and des-
peradoes— and in which he had always been the
victor, for his adversaries had all been slain to
a man. But his eyes, his most wonderful feature,
impressed me more than anything else; for one
was black and the other dark blue. All other
strange and extranatural things in nature, of
which I had personal knowledge, as, for instance,

158

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 159

mushrooms growing in rings, and the shrinking of
the sensitive plant when touched, and Will-o '-the-
wisps, and crowing hens, and the murderous at-
tack of social birds and beasts on one of their fel-
lows, seemed less strange and wonderful than the
fact that this man's eyes did not correspond, but
were the eyes of two men, as if there had been
two natures and souls in one body. My astonish-
ment was, perhaps, not unaccountable, when we
reflect that the eye is to us the window of the
mind or soul, that it expresses the soul, and is, as
it were, the soul itself materialized. Some person
lately published in England a book entitled * ' Soul-
Shapes," treating not only of the shapes of souls
but also of their color. The letter-press of this
work interests me less than the colored plates
adorning it. Passing over the mixed and vari-
colored souls, which resemble, in the illustrations,
colored maps in an atlas, we come to the blue soul,
for which the author has a very special regard.
Its blue is like that of the commonest type of blue
eye. This curious fancy of a blue soul probably
originated in the close association of eye and soul
in the mind. It is worthy of note that while the
mixed and other colored souls seem very much
out of shape, like an old felt hat or a stranded
jelly-fish, the pure-colored blue soul is round, like
an iris, and only wanted a pupil to be made an
eye.

But the subject of the color and expression of
eyes in man and animals must be reserved for the

160 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

next chapter; in the present chapter I shall con-
fine myself to the subject of vision in savage and
semi-barbarous men as compared with ours.

Here again I recall an incident of my boyhood,
and am not sure that it was not this that first gave
me an interest in the subject.

One summer day at home, I was attentively
listening, out of doors, to a conversation between
two men, both past middle life and about the same
age, one an educated Englishman, wearing spec-
tacles, the other a native, who was very impressive
in his manner, and was holding forth in a loud
authoritative voice on a variety of subjects. All
at once he fixed his eyes on the spectacles worn by
the other, and, bursting into a laugh, cried out,
"Why do you always wear those eye-hiding
glasses straddled across your nose? Are they
supposed to make a man look handsomer or wiser
than his fellows, or do you, a sensible person, real-
ly believe that you can see better than another
man because of them? If so, then all I can say is
that it is a fable, a delusion; no man can believe
such a thing."

He was only expressing the feeling that all per-
sons of his class, whose lives are passed in the
semi-barbarous conditions of the gauchos on the
pampas, experience at the sight of such artificial
helps to vision as spectacles. They look through
a pane of common glass, and it makes the view
no clearer, but rather dimmer — how can the two
diminutive circular panes carried before the eyes

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 161

produce any other effect? Besides, their sight as
a rule is good when they are young, and as they
progress in life they are not conscious of deca-
dence in it; from infancy to old age the world
looks, they imagine, the same, the grass as green,
the sky as blue as ever, and the scarlet verbenas
in the grass just as scarlet. The man lives in his
sight ; it is his life ; he speaks of the loss of it as a
calamity great as loss of reason. To see spec-
tacles amuses and irritates him at the same time ;
he has the monkey's impulse to snatch the idle
things from his fellow's nose; for not only is it
useless to the wearer, and a sham, but it is an-
noying to others, who do not like to look at a man
and not properly see his eyes, and the thought
that is in them.

To the mocking speech he had made the other
good-humoredly replied that he had worn glasses
for twenty years, that not only did they enable
him to see much better than he could without
them, but they had preserved his sight from fur-
ther decadence. Not satisfied with defending him-
self against the charge of being a fantastical per-
son for wearing glasses, he in his turn attacked
the mocker. * ' How do you know, ' ' he said, ' ' that
your own eyesight has not degenerated with time ?
You can only ascertain that by trying on a number
of glasses suited to a variety of sights, all in some
degree defective. A score of men with decaying
sight may be together, and in no two will the sight
be the same. You must try on spectacles, as you

162 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

try on boots, until you find a pair to fit you. You
may try mine if you like ; our years are the same,
and it is just possible that our eyes may be in the
same condition. ' '

The gaucho laughed a loud and scornful laugh,
and exclaimed that the idea was too ridiculous.
"What, see better with this thing!" and he took
them gingerly in his hand, and held them up to
examine them, and finally put them on his nose —
something in the spirit of the person who takes a
newspaper twisted into the shape of an extin-
guisher, and puts it on his head. He looked at the
other, then at me, then stared all round him, with
an expression of utter astonishment, and in the
end burst out in loud exclamations of delight.
For, strange to say, the glasses exactly suited his
vision, which, unknown to him, had probably been
decaying for years. "Angels of heaven, what is
this I see ! " he shouted. * ' What makes the trees
look so green — they were never so green before!
And so distinct — I can count their leaves! And
the cart over there — why, it is red as blood!"
And to satisfy himself that it had not just been
freshly painted he ran over to it and placed his
hand on the wood. It proved hard to convince
him that objects had once looked as distinct, and
leaves as green, and the sky as blue, and red paint
as red, to his natural sight, as they now did
through those magical glasses. The distinctness
and brightness seemed artificial and uncanny. But
in the end he was convinced, and then he wanted

'

GAUCHO WITH SPECTACLES

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 163

to keep the spectacles, and pulled out his money
to pay for them there and then, and was very
much put out when their owner insisted on having
them back. However, shortly afterwards a pair
was got for him; and with these on his nose he
galloped about the country, exhibiting them to all
his neighbors, and boasting of the miraculous
power they imparted to his eyes of seeing the
world as no one else could see it.

My Patagonian host and friend, whose intimate
knowledge of cards I have mentioned in a former
chapter, once informed me that always after the
first few rounds of a game he knew some of the
cards, and could recognize them as they were be-
ing dealt out, by means of certain slight shades
of difference in the coloring of the backs. He had
turned his attention to this business when very
young, and as he was close upon fifty when he
imparted this interesting piece of information,
and had always existed comfortably on his win-
nings, I saw no reason to disbelieve what he told
me. Yet this very man, whose vision was keen
enough to detect differences in cards so slight that
another could not see them, even when pointed
out — this preternaturally sharp-eyed individual
was greatly surprised when I explained to him
that half-a-dozen birds of the sparrow kind, that
fed in his courtyard, and sang and built their nests
in his garden and vineyard and fields, were not
one but six distinct species. He had never seen
any difference in them : they all had the same cus-

164 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

toms, the same motions; in size, color, and shape
they were all one ; to his hearing they all chirped
and twittered alike, and warbled the same song.

And as it was with this man, so, to some extent,
it is with all of us. That special thing which in-
terests us, and in which we find our profit or
pleasure, we see very distinctly, and our memories
are singularly tenacious of its image ; while other
things, in which we take only a general interest,
or which are nothing to us, are not seen so sharply,
and soon become blurred in memory ; and if there
happens to be a pretty close resemblance in sev-
eral of them, as in the case of my gambling
friend's half-a-dozen sparrows, which, like snow-
flakes, were "seen rather than distinguished," this
indistinctness of their images on the eye and the
mind causes them all to appear alike. We have, as
it were, two visions — one to which all objects ap-
pear vividly and close to us, and are permanently
photographed on the mind; the other which sees
things at a distance, and with that indistinctness
of outline and uniformity of color which distance
gives.

In this place I had proposed to draw on my La
Plata note-books for some amusing illustrations of
this fact of our two sights ; but it is not necessary
to go so far afield for illustrations, or to insist
on a thing so familiar. ' ' The shepherd knows his
sheep, " is a saying just as true of this country —
of Scotland, at all events — as of the far East.
Detectives, also military men who take an interest

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 165

in their profession, see faces more sharply than
most people, and remember them as distinctly as
others remember the faces of a very limited num-
ber of individuals — of those they love or fear or
constantly associate with. Sailors see atmos-
pheric changes which are not apparent to others ;
and, in like manner, the physician detects the signs
of malady in faces which to the uninstructed vision
seem healthy enough. And so on through the
whole range of professions and pursuits which
men have; each person inhabits a little world of
his own, as it were, which to others is only part
of the distant general blueness obscuring all
things, but in which, to him, every object stands
out with wonderful clearness, and plainly tells its
story.

All this may sound very trite, very trivial, and
matter of common knowledge — so common as to
be known to every schoolboy, and to the boy that
goeth not to school; yet it is because this simple
familiar fact has been ignored, or has not always
been borne in mind by our masters, that they
have taught us an error, namely, that savages are
our superiors in visual power, and that the differ-
ence is so great that ours is a dim decaying sense
compared with their brilliant faculty, and that
only when we survey the prospect through power-
ful field-glasses do we rise to their level, and see
the world as they see it. The truth is that the
savage sight is no better than ours, although it
might seem natural enough to think the contrary,

166 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

on account of their simple natural life in the des-
ert, which is always green and restful to the eye,
or supposed to be so; and because they have no
gas nor even candlelight to irritate the visual
nerve, and do themselves no injury by poring over
miserable books.

Possibly, then, the beginning of the error was
in this preconceived notion, that greenness and the
absence of artificial light, with other conditions
of a primitive life, keep the sight from deteriorat-
ing. The eye's adaptiveness did not get sufficient
credit. We know how the muscles may be devel-
oped by training, that the blacksmith and prize-
fighter have mightier arms than others ; but it was
perhaps assumed that the complex structure and
extreme delicacy of the eye would make it less
adaptive than other and coarser organs. What-
ever the origin of the error may have been, it is
certain that it has received the approval of scien-
tists, and that they never open their lips on the
subject except to give it fresh confirmation. Their
researches have brought to light a great variety
of eye-troubles, which, in many cases, are not
troublesome at all, until they are discovered,
named with a startling name, and described in
terms very alarming to persons of timid character.
Frequently they are not maladies, but inherited
defects, like bandy legs, prominent teeth, crushed
toes, tender skin, and numberless other malforma-
tions. That such eye-defects are as common
among savages as among ourselves, I do not say,

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 167

and to this matter I shall return later on ; but until
the eyes of savages are scientifically examined, ft
seems a very bold thing to say that defective color-
sense is due to the inimical conditions of our civil-
ization ; for we know as little about the color-sense
of savages as we do about the color-sense of the
old Greeks. That the savage sight is vastly more
powerful than ours was perhaps not so bold a
thing to say, seeing that in this matter our teach-
ers were misled by travelers' tales, and perhaps
by other considerations, as, for instance, the ab-
sence of artificial aids to sight among the children
of nature. The redskin may be very old, but as
he sits sunning himself before his wigwam in the
early morning he is never observed to trombone
his newspaper.

The reader may spare himself the trouble of
smiling, for this is not mere supposition; in this
case observation came first and reflection after-
wards, for I happen to know something of savages
from experience, and when they were using their
eyes in their way, and for their purposes, I used
mine for my purpose, which was different. It is
true that the redskin will point you out an object
in the distance and tell its character, and it will
be to your sight only a dark-colored object, which
might be a bush, or stone, or animal of some large
kind, or even a house. The secret of the differ-
ence is that his eye is trained and accustomed to
see certain things, which he looks for and expects
to find. Put him where the conditions are new to

168 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

him and he will be at fault ; or, even on his native
heath, set him before an unfamiliar or unexpected
object, and he will show no superiority over his
civilized brother. I have witnessed one instance
in which not one but five men were all in fault, and
made a wrong guess ; while the one person of our
party who guessed correctly, or saw better per-
haps, was a child of civilization and a reader of
books, and, what is perhaps even more, the de-
scendant of a long line of bookish men. This
amazed me at the moment, for until then my child-
like faith in the belief of Humboldt, and of the
world generally, on the subject had never been
disturbed. Now I see how this curious thing hap-
pened. The object was at such a distance that
to all of us alike it presented no definite form, but
was merely something dark, standing against a
hoary background of tall grass-plumes. Our
guides, principally regarding its size, at once
guessed it to be an animal which they no doubt
expected to find in that place — namely, a wild
horse. The other, who did not have that training
of the eye and mind for distant objects in the
desert, which is like an instinct, and, like instinct,
is liable to mistakes, and who carefully studied its
appearance for himself, pronounced it to be a dark
bush. When we got near it turned out to be a
clump of tall bullrushes, growing in a place where
they had no business to grow, and burnt by
drought and frosts to so dark a brown that at a
distance they seemed quite black.

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 169

In the following case the savage was right. I
pointed out an object, dark, far off, so low down
as to be just visible above the tall grasses, passing
with a falling and rising motion like that of a
horseman going at a swinging gallop. " There
goes a mounted man," I remarked. "No — a
traru," returned my companion, after one swift
glance; the trarii being a large, black, eagle-like
bird of the plains, the carancho of the whites —
Polyborus tharus. But the object was not neces-
sarily more distinct to him than to me ; he could
not see wings and beak at that distance ; but the
traru was a familiar object, which he was accus-
tomed to see at all distances — a figure in the land-
scape which he looked for and expected to find. It
was only a dark blot on the horizon; but he knew
the animal's habits and appearance, and that
when seen far off, in its low down, dilatory, rising
and falling flight, it simulates the appearance of
a horseman in full gallop. To know this and a
few other things was his vocation. If one had set
him to find a reversed little "s" in the middle of
a closely-printed page the tears would have run
down his brown cheeks, and he would have aban-
doned the vain quest with aching eyeballs. Yet
the proofreader can find the reversed little "s"
in a few moments, without straining his sight.
But it is infinitely more important to the savage
of the plains than to us to see distant moving ob-
jects quickly and guess their nature correctly. His
daily food, the recovery of his lost animals, and

170 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

his personal safety depend on it; and it is not,
therefore, strange that every blot of dark color,
every moving and motionless object on the hori-
zon, tells its story better to him than to a stran-
ger; especially when we consider how small a
variety of objects he is called on to see and judge
of in the level monotonous region he inhabits.

This quick judging of dimly seen distant things,
the eye and mind-achievement of the mounted bar-
barian on the unobstructed plains, is not nearly so
admirable as that of his fellow-savage in sub-
tropical regions overspread with dense vegetation,
with animal life in great abundance and variety,
and where half the attention must be given to
species dangerous to man, often very small in size.
In some hot humid forest districts, the European
who should attempt to hunt or explore with bare
feet and legs would be pricked and lacerated at
almost every step of his progress, and probably
get bitten by a serpent before the day's end. Yet
the Indian passes his life there, and, naked or half
naked, explores the unknown wilderness of thorns,
and has only his arrows to provide food for him-
self and his wife and children. He does not get
pierced with thorns and bitten by serpents, be-
cause his eye is nicely trained to pick them out in
time to save himself. He walks rapidly, but he
knows every shade of green, every smooth and
crinkled leaf, in that dense tangle, full of snares
and deceptions, through which he is obliged to
walk ; and much as leaf resembles leaf, he sets his

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 171

foot where he can safely set it, or, quickly choos-
ing between two evils, where the prickles and
thorns are softest, or, for some reason known to
him, hurt least. In like manner he distinguishes
the coiled-up venomous snake, although it lies so
motionless — a habit common to the most deadly
kinds — and in its dull imitative coloring is so diffi-
cult to be distinguished on the brown earth, and
among gray sticks and sere and variegated leaves.

A friend of mine, Fontana of Buenos Ayres,
who has a life-long acquaintance with the Argen-
tine Indians, expresses the opinion that at the age
of twelve years the savage of the Pampas has
completed his education, and is thereafter able to
take care of himself; but that the savage of the
Gran Chaco — the sub-tropical Argentine territory
bordering on Paraguay and Bolivia — if left to
shift for himself at that age would speedily per-
ish, since he is then only in the middle of his long,
difficult, and painful apprenticeship. It was curi-
ous and pitiful, he says, to see the little Indian
children in the Chaco, when their skins were yet
tender, stealing away from their mother, and try-
ing to follow the larger ones playing at a distance.
At every step they would fall, and get pricked
with thorns or cut with sharp-edged rushes, and
tangled in the creepers, and hurt and crying they
would struggle on, and in this painful manner
learn at last where to set their feet.

The snake on the ground, colored like the
ground, and shaped like the dead curved sticks

172 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

or vines seen everywhere on the ground, and mo-
tionless like the vine, does not more closely as-
similate to its surroundings than birds in trees
often do — the birds which the Indian must also
see. A stranger in these regions, even the natural-
ist with a sight quickened by enthusiasm, finds it
hard to detect a parrot in a lofty tree, even when
he knows that parrots are there ; for their green-
ness in the green foliage, and the correlated habit
they possess of remaining silent and motionless
in the presence of an intruder, make them invisible
to him, and he is astonished that the Indian should
be able to detect them. The Indian knows how to
look for them; it is his trade, which is long to
learn ; but he is obliged to learn it, for his success
in life, and even life itself, depends on it, since
in the savage state Nature kills those who fail in
her competitive examinations.

The reader has doubtless often seen those little
picture-puzzles, variously labeled "Where's the
Cat!" or "Mad Bull," or "Burglar," or "Police-
man," or "Snake in the Grass," etc., in which the
thing named and to be discovered is formed by
branches and foliage, and by running water, and
drapery, and lights and shadows in the sketch.
At first one finds it extremely difficult to detect
this picture within a picture; and at last — with
the suddenness with which one invariably detects
a dull-colored snake, seen previously but not dis-
tinguished— the object sought for appears, and
is thereafter so plain to the eye that one cannot

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 173

look at the sketch, even held at a distance, without
seeing the cat, or policeman, or whatever it hap-
pens to be. And after patiently studying some
scores or hundreds of these puzzles one gets to
know just how to find the thing concealed, and
finds it quickly — almost at a glance at last. Now
the ingenious person that first invented this pretty
puzzle probably had no thought of Nature, with
her curious imitative and protective resemblances,
in his mind ; yet he might very well have taken the
hint from Nature, for this is what she does. The
animal that must be seen to be avoided, and the
animal that must be seen to be taken, are there
in her picture, sketched in with such cunning art
that to the uninstructed eye they form only por-
tions of branch and foliage and shadow and sun-
light above, and dull-hued or variegated earth and
stones and dead and withering herbage under-
neath.

It is possible that slight differences may exist
in the seeing powers of different nations, due to
the effect of physical conditions: thus, the in-
habitants of mountainous districts and of dry ele-
vated tablelands may have a better sight than
dwellers in low, humid, and level regions, although
just the reverse may be the case. Among Euro-
pean nations the Germans are generally supposed
to have weak eyes, owing, some imagine, to their
excessive indulgence in tobacco; while others at-
tribute the supposed decay to the form of type
used in their books, which requires closer looking

174 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

at than ours in reading. That they will deteriorate
still further in this direction, and from being a
spectacled people become a blind one, to the joy
of their enemies, is not likely to happen, and prob-
ably the decadence has been a great deal exagger-
ated. Animals living in darkness become near-
sighted, and then nearer-sighted still, and so on
progressively until the vanishing point is reached.
In a community or nation a similar decline might
begin from much reading of German books, or
perpetual smoking of pipes with big china bowls,
or from some other unknown cause ; but the decay
could not progress far, because there is nothing in
man to take the place of sight, as there is in the
blind cave rats and fishes and insects. And if we
could survey mankind from China to Peru with
all the scientific appliances which are brought to
bear on the Board-school children in London, and
on the nation generally, the differences in the
powers of vision in the various races, nations, and
tribes, would probably appear very insignificant:
The mistake which eye specialists and writers on
the eye make is that they think too much about
the eye. When they affirm that the conditions of
our civilization are highly injurious to the sight,
do they mean all the million conditions, or sets of
conditions, embraced by our system, with the
infinite variety of occupations and modes of living
which men have, from the lighthouse-keeper to
the worker underground, whose day is the dim
glimmer of a miner 's lamp 1 l * An organ exercised

VIEWING A DISTANT OBJECT

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 175

beyond its wont will grow, and thus meet increase
of demand by increase of supply," Herbert Spen-
cer says; but, he adds, there is a limit soon
reached, beyond which it is impossible to go. This
increase of demand with us is everywhere — now
on this organ and now on that, according to our
work and way of life, and the eye is in no worse
case than the other organs. There are among us
many cases of heart complaint; civilization, in
such cases, has put too great a strain on that or-
gan, and it has reached the limit beyond which
it cannot go. And so with the eye. The total
number of the defective among us is no doubt very
large, for we know that our system of life retards
— it cannot effectually prevent — the healthy ac-
tion of natural selection. Nature pulls one way
and we pull the other, compassionately trying to
save the unfit from the consequences of their unfit-
ness. The humane instinct compels us; but the
cruel instinct of the savage is less painful to con-
template than that mistaken or perverted compas-
sion which seeks to perpetuate unfitness, and in
the interest of suffering individuals inflicts a last-
ing injury on the race. It is a beautiful and sacred
thing to minister to the blind, and to lead them,
but a horrible thing to encourage them to marry
and transmit the miserable defective condition
to their posterity. Yet this is very common ; and
not long ago a leader-writer in one of the prin-
cipal London journals spoke of this very thing
in terms of rapturous approval, and looked for-

176 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

ward to the growth of a totally blind race of men
among us, as though it were something to be proud
of — a triumph of our civilization!

Pelleschi, in his admirable book on the Chaco
Indians, says that malformations are never seen
in these savages, that physically they are all per-
fect men ; and he remarks that in their exceedingly
hard struggle for existence in a thorny wilderness,
beset with perils, any bodily defect or ailment
would be fatal. And as the eye in their life is
the most important organ, it must be an eye with-
out flaw. In this circumstance only do savages
differ from us — namely, in the absence or rarity
of defective eyes among them; and when those
who, like Dr. Brudenell Carter, believe in the de-
cadence of the eye in civilized man quote Hum-
boldt's words about the miraculous sight of South
American savages, they quote an error. It is
not strange that Humboldt should have fallen into
it, for, after all, he had only the means which we
all possess of finding out things — a limited sight
and a fallible mind. Like the savage, he had
trained his faculties to observe and infer, and his
inferences, like those of the savage, were some-
times wrong.

The savage sight is no better than ours for the
simple reason that a better is not required. Na-
ture has given to him, as to all her creatures, only
what was necessary, and nothing for ostentation.
Standing on the ground, his horizon is a limited
one ; and the animals he preys on, if often sharper-

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 177

eyed and swifter than he, are without intelligence,
and thus things are made equal. He can see the
rhea as far as the rhea can see him; and if he
possessed the eagle's far-seeing faculty it would
be of no advantage to him. The high-soaring eagle
requires to see very far, but the low-flying owl
is near-sighted. And so on through the whole ani-
mal world: each kind has sight sufficient to find
its food and escape from its enemies, and nothing
beyond. Animals that live close to the surface
have a very limited sight. Moreover, other facul-
ties may usurp the eye's place, or develop so
greatly as to make the eye of only secondary im-
portance as an organ of intelligence. The snake
offers a curious case. No other sense seems to
have developed in it, yet I take the snake to be
one of the nearest-sighted creatures in existence.
From long observation of them I am convinced
that small snakes of very sluggish habits do not
see distinctly farther than from one to three yards.
But the sluggish snake is the champion faster in
the animal world, and can afford to lie quiescent
until the wind of chance blows something eatable
in its way; hence it does not require to see an
object distinctly until almost within striking dis-
tance. Another remarkable case is that of the ar-
madillo. Of two species I can confidently say
that, if they are not blind, they are next door to
blindness; yet they are diurnal animals that go
abroad in the full glare of noon and wander far
in search of food. But their sense of smell is

178 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

marvelously acute, and, as in the case of the
mole, it has made sight superfluous. To come back
to man: if, in a state of nature, he is able to
guess the character of objects nine times in ten,
or nineteen in twenty, seen as far as he requires to
see anything, his intellectual faculties make a bet-
ter sight unnecessary. If the armadillo's scent
had not been so keen, and man had not been gifted
with nimble brains, the sight in both cases would
have been vastly stronger; but the sharpening of
its sense of smell has dimmed the armadillo 's eyes
and made him blinder than a snake; while man
(from no fault of his own) is unable to see farther
than the wolf and the ostrich and the wild ass.

CHAPTER XII
CONCERNING EYES

WHITE, crimson, emerald green, shining
golden yellow, are amongst the colors seen
in the eyes of birds. In owls, herons, cormorants,
and many other tribes, the brightly-tinted eye is
incomparably the finest feature and chief glory.
It fixes the attention at once, appearing like a
splendid gem, for which the airy bird-body, with
its graceful curves and soft tints, forms an ap-
propriate setting. When the eye closes in death,
the bird, except to the naturalist, becomes a mere
bundle of dead feathers; crystal globes may be
put into the empty sockets, and a bold life-imitat-
ing attitude given to the stuffed specimen ; but the
vitreous orbs shoot forth no life-like flames, the
"passion and the fire whose fountains are within"
have vanished, and the best work of the taxider-
mist, who has given a life to his bastard art, pro-
duces in the mind only sensations of irritation and
disgust. In museums, where limited space stands
in the way of any abortive attempts at copying
nature too closely, the stuff er's work is endurable
because useful; but in a drawing-room, who does
not close his eyes or turn aside to avoid seeing a

179

180 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

case of stuffed birds — those unlovely mementoes
of death in their gay plumes ? Who does not shud-
der, albeit not with fear, to see the wild cat, filled
with straw, yawning horribly, and trying to
frighten the spectator with its crockery glare?
I shall never forget the first sight I had of the
late Mr. Gould's collection of humming-birds (now
in the National Museum), shown to me by the
naturalist himself, who evidently took consider-
able pride in the work of his hands. I had just
left tropical nature behind me across the Atlantic,
and the unexpected meeting with a transcript of
it in a dusty room in Bedford Square gave me a
distinct shock. Those pellets of dead feathers,
which had long ceased to sparkle and shine, stuck
with wires — not invisible — over blossoming cloth
and tinsel bushes, how melancholy they made me
feel!

Considering the bright color and great splendor
of some eyes, particularly in birds, it seems prob-
able that in these cases the organ has a twofold
use: first and chiefly, to see; secondly, to intimi-
date an adversary with those luminous mirrors, in
which all the dangerous fury of a creature brought
to bay is seen depicted. Throughout nature the
dark eye predominates; and there is certainly a
great depth of fierceness in the dark eye of a bird
of prey; but its effect is less than that produced
by the vividly-colored eye, or even of the white
eye of some raptorial species, as, for instance,
of the common South American hawk, Asturina

CONCERNING EYES 181

pucherani. Violent emotions are associated in our
minds — possibly, also, in the minds of other spe-
cies— with certain colors. Bright red seems the
appropriate hue of anger — the poet Herbert even
calls the rose "angrie and brave" on account of
its hue — and the red or orange certainly expresses
resentment better than the dark eye. Even a very
slight spontaneous variation in the coloring of the
irides might give an advantage to an individual
for natural selection to act on ; for we can see in
almost any living creature that not only in its
perpetual metaphorical struggle for existence is
its life safeguarded in many ways ; but when pro-
tective resemblances, flight, and instincts of con-
cealment all fail, and it is compelled to engage in
a real struggle with a living adversary, it is pro-
vided for such occasions with another set of de-
fenses. Language and attitudes of defiance come
into play; feathers or hairs are erected; beaks
snap and strike, or teeth are gnashed, and the
mouth foams or spits ; the body puffs out ; wings
are waved or feet stamped on the ground, and
many other intimidating gestures of rage are prac-
tised. It is not possible to believe that the color-
ing of the crystal globes, towards which an op-
ponent's sight is first directed, and which most
vividly exhibit the raging emotions within, can
have been entirely neglected as a means of defense
by the principle of selection in nature. For all
these reasons I believe the bright-colored eye is an
improvement on the dark eye.

182 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Man has been very little improved in this direc-
tion, the dark eye, except in the north of Europe,
having been, until recent times, almost or quite
universal. The blue eye does not seem to have
any advantage for man in a state of nature, being
mild where fierceness of expression is required;
it is almost unknown amongst the inferior crea-
tures; and only on the supposition that the ap-
pearance of the eye is less important to man's
welfare than it is to that of other species, can
we account for its survival in a branch of the hu-
man race.

Cerulean eyes; locks comparable in hue to the
''yellow hair that floats on the eastern clouds,"
and a white body, like snow with a blush on it —
what could Nature have been dreaming of when
she gave such things to her rudest most savage
humans ! That they should have overcome dark-
eyed races, and trod on their necks and ruined
their works, strikes one as unnatural, and reads
like a fable.

Little, however, as the human eye has changed,
assuming it to have been dark originally, there
is a great deal of spontaneous variation in indi-
viduals, light hazel and blue-gray being appar-
ently the most variable. I have found curiously
marked and spotted eyes not uncommon; in some
instances the spots being so black, round, and
large as to produce the appearance of eyes with
clusters of pupils on them. I have known one per-
son with large brown spots on light blue-gray

CONCERNING EYES 183

eyes, whose children all inherited the peculiarity ;
also another with reddish hazel irides thickly
marked with fine characters resembling Greek let-
ters. This person was an Argentine of Spanish
blood, and was called by his neighbors ojos escri-
tos, or written eyes. It struck me as a very curi-
ous circumstance that these eyes, both in their
ground color and the form and disposition of the
markings traced on them, were precisely like the
eyes of a species of grebe, common in La Plata.
Browning had perhaps observed eyes of this kind
in some person he had met, when he makes his
magician say to Pietro de Abano, —

Mark within my eyes its iris mystic lettered —
That's my name!

But we look in vain amongst men for the splen-
did crimson, flaming yellow, or startling white
orbs which would have made the dark-skinned
brave, inspired by violent emotions, a being ter-
rible to see. Nature has neglected man in this
respect, and it is to remedy the omission that he
stains his face with bright pigments and crowns
his head with eagles ' barred plumes.

The quality of shining in the dark, seen in the
eyes of many nocturnal and semi-nocturnal spe-
cies, has always, I believe, a hostile purpose.
When found in inoffensive species, as, for in-
stance, in the lemurs, it can only be attributed to
mimicry, and this would be a parallel case with

184 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

butterflies mimicking the brilliant " warning col-
ors ' ' of other species on which birds do not prey.
Cats amongst mammals, and owls amongst birds,
have been most highly favored ; but to the owls the
palm must be given. The feline eyes, as of a puma
or wild cat, blazing with wrath, are wonderful to
see ; sometimes the sight of them affects one like an
electric shock ; but for intense brilliance and quick
changes, the dark orbs kindling with the startling
suddenness of a cloud illumined by flashes of light-
ning, the yellow globes of the owl are unparalleled.
Some readers might think my language exagger-
ated. Descriptions of bright sunsets and of
storms with thunder and lightning would, no
doubt, sound extravagant to one who had never
witnessed these phenomena. Those only who
spend years "conversing with wild animals in
desert places," to quote Azara's words, know that,
as with the atmosphere, so with animal life, there
are special moments ; and that a creature present-
ing a very sorry appearance dead in a museum,
or living in captivity, may, when hard pressed
and fighting for life in its own fastness, be sub-
limed by its fury into a weird and terrible ob-
ject.

Nature has many surprises for those who wait
on her; one of the greatest she ever favored me
with was the sight of a wounded Magellanic eagle-
owl I shot in Patagonia. The haunt of this bird
was an island in the river, overgrown with giant
grasses and tall willows, leafless now, for it was

CONCERNING EYES 185

in the middle of winter. Here I sought for and
found him waiting on his perch for the sun to set.
He eyed me so calmly when I aimed my gun, I
scarcely had the heart to pull the trigger. He
had reigned there so long, the feudal tyrant of
that remote wilderness ! Many a water-rat, steal-
ing like a shadow along the margin between the
deep stream and the giant rushes, he had snatched
away to death; many a spotted wild pigeon had
woke on its perch at night with his cruel crooked
talons piercing its flesh ; and beyond the valley on
the bushy uplands many a crested tinamou had
been slain on her nest and her beautiful glossy
dark green eggs left to grow pale in the sun and
wind, the little lives that were in them dead be-
cause of their mother's death. But I wanted that
bird badly, and hardened my heart ; the ' ' demonia-
cal laughter" with which he had so often answered
the rushing sound of the swift black river at even-
tide would be heard no more. I fired ; he swerved
on his perch, remained suspended for a few mo-
ments, then slowly fluttered down. Behind the
spot where he had fallen was a great mass of
tangled dark-green grass, out of which rose the
tall, slender boles of the trees ; overhead through
the fretwork of leafless twigs the sky was flushed
with tender roseate tints, for the sun had now gone
down and the surface of the earth was in shadow.
There, in such a scene, and with the wintry quiet
of the desert over it all, I found my victim stung,
by his wounds to fury and prepared for the last

186 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

supreme effort. Even in repose he is a big eagle-
like bird; now his appearance was quite altered,
and in the dim, uncertain light he looked gigantic
in size — a monster of strange form and terrible
aspect. Each particular feather stood out on end,
the tawny barred tail spread out like a fan, the
immense tiger-colored wings wide open and rigid,
so that as the bird that had clutched the grass with
his great feathered claws, swayed his body slowly
from side to side — just as a snake about to strike
sways his head, or as an angry watchful cat moves
its tail — first the tip of one, then of the other wing
touched the ground. The black horns stood erect,
while in the center of the wheel-shaped head the
beak snapped incessantly, producing a sound re-
sembling the clicking of a sewing-machine. This
was a suitable setting for the pair of magnificent
furious eyes, on which I gazed with a kind of fas-
cination, not unmixed with fear when I remem-
bered the agony of pain suffered on former occa-
sions from sharp, crooked talons driven into me
to the bone. The irides were of a bright orange
color, but every time I attempted to approach the
bird they kindled into great globes of quivering
yellow flame, the black pupils being surrounded
by a scintillating crimson light which threw out
minute yellow sparks into the air. When I retired
from the bird this preternatural fiery aspect would
instantly vanish.

The dragon eyes of that Magellanic owl haunt
me still, and when I remember them, the bird's

MAGELLAN1C EAGLE OWL

CONCERNING EYES 187

death still weighs on my conscience, albeit by
killing it I bestowed on it that dusty immortality
which is the portion of stuffed specimens in a
museum.

The question as to the cause of this fiery ap-
pearance is one hard to answer. We know that
the source of the luminosity in owls' and cats'
eyes is the tapedum lucidum — the light-reflecting
membrane between the retina and the sclerotic
coat of the eyeball; but the mystery remains.
"When with the bird, I particularly noticed that
every time I retired the nictitating membrane
would immediately cover the eyes and obscure
them for some time, as they will when an owl is
confronted with strong sunlight; and this gave
me the impression that the fiery, flashing appear-
ance was accompanied with, or followed by, a
burning or smarting sensation. I will here quote
a very suggestive passage from a letter on this
subject written to me by a gentleman of great at-
tainments in science : ' ' Eyes certainly do shine in
the dark — some eyes, e.g. those of cats and owls;
and the scintillation you speak of is probably an-
other form of the phenomenon. It probably de-
pends upon some extra-sensibility of the retina
analogous to what exists in the molecular consti-
tution of sulphide of calcium and other phosphor-
escent substances. The difficulty is in the scintilla-
tion. We know that light of this character has its
source in the heat vibrations of molecules at the
temperature of incandescence, and the electric

188 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

light is no exception to the rule. A possible ex-
planation is that suprasensitive retinae in times of
excitement become increasedly phosphorescent,
and the same excitement causes a change in the
curvature of the lens, so that the light is focused,
and pro tanto brightened into sparks. Seeing how
little we know of natural forces, it may be that
what we call light in such a case is eye speaking to
eye — an emanation from the window of one brain
into the window of another. ' '

Probably all those cases one hears and reads
about — some historical — of human eyes flashing
fire and blazing with wrath, are mere poetic exag-
gerations. One would not look for these fiery eyes
amongst the peaceful children of civilization, who,
when they make war, do so without anger, and kill
their enemies by machinery, without even seeing
them; but amongst savage or semi-savage men,
carnivorous in their diet, fierce in disposition, and
extremely violent in their passions. It is precisely
amongst people of this description that I have
lived a great deal. I have often seen them frenzied
with excitement, their faces white as ashes, hair
erect, and eyes dropping great tears of rage, but
I have never seen anything in them even ap-
proaching to that fiery appearance described in
the owl.

Nature has done comparatively little for the
human eye, not only in denying it the terrifying
splendors found in some other species, but also
in the minor merit of beauty. When going about

CONCERNING- EYES 189

the world one cannot help thinking that the vari-
ous races and tribes of men, differing in the color
of their skins and in the climates and conditions
they live in, ought to have differently-colored eyes.
In Brazil, I was greatly struck with the magnifi-
cent appearance of many of the negro women I
saw there; well-formed, tall, majestic creatures,
often appropriately clothed in loose white gowns
and white turban-like headdresses ; while on their
round polished blue-black arms they wore silver
armlets. It seemed to me that pale golden irides,
as in the intensely black tyrant-bird Lichenops
perspicillata, would have given a finishing glory
to these sable beauties, completing their strange
unique loveliness. Again in that exquisite type of
female beauty which we see in the white girl wittt
a slight infusion of negro blood, giving the grace-
ful frizzle to the hair, the purple-red hue to the
lips, and the delicate dusky terra-cotta tinge to
the skin, an eye more suitable than the dark dull
brown would have been the intense orange-brown
seen in some lemur's eyes. For many very dark-
skinned tribes nothing more beautiful than the
ruby-red iris could be imagined; while sea-green
eyes would have best suited dusky-pale Poly-
nesians and languid peaceful tribes like the one
described in Tennyson's poem: —

And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

190 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Since we cannot have the eyes we should like
best to have, let us consider those that Nature
has given us. The incomparable beauty of the
"emerald eye" has been greatly praised by the
poets, particularly by those of Spain. Emerald
eyes, if they only existed, would certainly be beau-
tiful beyond all others, especially if set off with
dark or black hair and that dim pensive creamy
pallor of the skin frequently seen in warm cli-
mates, and which is more beautiful than the rosy
complexion prevalent in northern regions, though
not so lasting. But either they do not exist or else
I have been very unfortunate, for after long seek-
ing I am compelled to confess that never yet have
I been gratified by the sight of emerald eyes. I
have seen eyes called green, that is, eyes with a
greenish tinge or light in them, but they were not
the eyes I sought. One can easily forgive the
poets their misleading descriptions, since they are
not trustworthy guides, and very often, like
Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass,
make words do ' ' extra work. ' ' For sober fact one
is accustomed to look to men of science; yet,
strange to say, while these complain that we — the
unscientific ones — are without any settled and cor-
rect ideas about the color of our own eyes, they
have endorsed the poet's fable, and have even
taken considerable pains to persuade the world of
its truth. Dr. Paul Broca is their greatest au-
thority. In his Manual for Anthropologists he
divides human eyes into four distinct types —

CONCERNING EYES 191

orange, green, blue, gray; and these four again
into five varieties each. The symmetry of such
a classification suggests at once that it is an arbi-
trary one. Why orange, for instance? Light
hazel, clay color, red, dull brown, cannot prop-
erly be called orange ; but the division requires the
five supposed varieties of the dark pigmented eye
to be grouped under one name, and because there
is yellow pigment in some dark eyes they are all
called orange. Again, to make the five gray varie-
ties the lightest gray is made so very light that
only when placed on a sheet of white paper does it
show gray at all; but there is always some color
in the human skin, so that Broca's eye would ap-
pear absolutely white by contrast — a thing un-
heard of in nature. Then we have the green, be-
ginning with the palest sage green, and up through
grass green and emerald green, to the deepest sea
green and the green of the holly leaf. Do such
eyes exist in nature ? In theory they do. The blue
eye is blue, and the gray gray, because in such eyes
there is no yellow or brown pigment on the outer
surface of the iris to prevent the dark purple pig-
ment— the uvea — on the inner surface from being
seen through the membrane, which has different
degrees of opacity, making the eye appear gray,
light or dark blue, or purple, as the case may be.
When yellow pigment is deposited in small quan-
tity on the outer membrane, then it should, accord-
ing to the theory, blend with the inner blue and
make green. Unfortunately for the anthropolo-

192 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

gists, it doesn't. It only gives in some cases the
greenish variable tinge I have mentioned, but
nothing approaching to the decided greens of
Broca's tables. Given an eye with the right de-
gree of translucency in the membrane and a very
thin deposit of yellow pigment spread equally
over the surface; the result would be a perfectly
green iris. Nature, however, does not proceed
quite in this way. The yellow pigment varies
greatly in hue; it is muddy yellow, brown, or
earthy color, and it never spreads itself uniformly
over the surface, but occurs in patches grouped
about the pupil and spreads in dull rays or lines
and spots, so that the eye • which science says
"ought to be called green" is usually a very dull
blue-gray, or brownish-blue, or clay color, and in
some rare instances shows a changeable greenish
hue.

In the remarks accompanying the Report of the
Anthropometric Committee of the British As-
sociation for 1881 and 1883, it is said that green
eyes are more common than the tables indicater
and that eyes that should properly be called green,
owing to the popular prejudice against that term,
have been recorded as gray or some other color.

Does any such prejudice exist? or is it necessary
to go about with the open manual in our hands
to know a green eye when we see one f No doubt
the "popular prejudice" is supposed to have its
origin in Shakespeare's description of jealousy as
a green-eyed monster ; but if Shakespeare has any

CONCERNING EYES 193

great weight with the popular mind, the prejudice
ought to be the other way, since he is one of those
who sing the splendors of the green eye.
Thus in Romeo and Juliet : —

The eagle, madam,

Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath.

The lines are, however, nonsense, as green-eyed
eagles have no existence; and perhaps the ques-
tion of the popular prejudice is not worth argu-
ing about.

Once only in my long years' quest after green
eyes, during which I have sometimes walked miles
along a crowded thoroughfare seeing the orbs of
every person that passed me, was I led to think
that my reward had come at last. On taking my
seat in a public conveyance I noticed a fashion-
ably-dressed lady, of a singularly attractive ap-
pearance, on the opposite seat, but a little higher
up. Her skin was somewhat pale, her hair dark,
and her eyes green! "At last!" I exclaimed,
mentally, glad as if I had found a priceless gem.
It was misery to me to have to observe her fur-
tively, to think that I should so soon lose sight of
her! Several minutes passed, during which she
did not move her head, and still the eyes were
green — not one of the dull and dark hues that
Broca imagined and painted, but a clear, exquis-
itely beautiful sea-green, as sea-water looks with
a strong sunlight in it, where it is deep and pure,

194 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

in the harbor of some rocky island under the
tropics. At length, not yet convinced, I moved a
little higher up on my seat, so that when I should
next look at her her eyes would meet mine full and
straight. The wished (and feared) moment came :
alas ! the eyes were no longer green, but gray, and
not very pure in color. Having looked green when
viewed obliquely, they could not be a very pure
gray : they were simply gray eyes with an exceed-
ingly thin pigment, so thin as not to appear as pig-
ment, equally spread over the surface of the irides.
This made the eyes in some lights appear green,
just as a dog's eyes, when the animal sits in
shadow and the upturned balls catch the light,
sometimes look pure green. I know a dog, now
living, whose eyes in such circumstances always
appear of that color. But as a rule the dog's
eyes take a hyaline blue.

If we could leave out the mixed or neutral eyes,
which are in a transitional state — blue eyes with
some pigment obscuring their blueness, and mak-
ing them quite unclassifiable, as no two pairs of
eyes are found alike — then all eyes might be di-
vided into two great natural orders, those with
and those without pigment on the outer surface
of the membrane. They could not well be called
light and dark eyes, since many hazel eyes are
really lighter than purple and dark gray eyes.
They might, however, be simply called brown and
blue, for in all eyes with the outer pigment there
is brown, or something scarcely distinguishable

CONCEKNING EYES 195

from brown; and all eyes without pigment, even
the purest grays, have some blueness.

Brown eyes express animal passions rather than
intellect and the higher moral feelings. They are
frequently equaled in their own peculiar kind of
eloquence by the brown or dark eyes in the domes-
tic dog. In animals there is, in fact, often an exag-
gerated eloquence of expression. To judge from
their eyes, caged cats and eagles in the Zoological
Gardens are all furred and feathered Bonnivards.
Even in the most intellectual of men the brown
eye speaks more of the heart than of the head. In
the inferior creatures the black eye is always keen
and cunning or else soft and mild, as in fawns,
doves, aquatic birds, etc.; and it is remarkable
that in man also the black eye — dark brown iris
with large pupil — generally has one or the other
of these predominant expressions. Of course, in
highly civilized communities, individual exceptions
are extremely numerous. Spanish and negro
wromen have wonderfully soft and loving eyes,
while the cunning weasel-like eye is common every-
where, especially amongst Asiatics. In high-caste
Orientals the keen, cunning look has been refined
and exalted to an appearance of marvelous sub-
tlety— the finest expression of which the black eye
is capable.

The blue eye — all blues and grays being here in-
cluded— is par excellence, the eye of intellectual
man: that outer warm-colored pigment hanging
like a cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its

196 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

most spiritual emanations, so that only when it is
quite blown away are we able to look into the soul,
forgetting man's kinship with the brutes. When
one is unaccustomed to it from always living with
dark-eyed races, the blue eye seems like an
anomaly in nature, if not a positive blunder; for
its power of expressing the lower and commonest
instincts and passions of our race is compara-
tively limited ; and in cases where the higher facul-
ties are undeveloped it seems vacant and meaning-
less. Add to this that the ethereal blue color is
associated in the mind with atmospheric phenom-
ena rather than with solid matter, inorganic or
animal. It is the hue of the void, expressionless
sky; of shadows on far-off hill and cloud; of wa-
ter under certain conditions of the atmosphere,
and of the unsubstantial summer haze, —

whose margin fades
For ever and for ever as I move.

In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely
used in the quickly-perishing flowers of some frail
plants ; while a few living things of free and buoy-
ant motions, like birds and butterflies, have been
touched on the wings with the celestial tint only
to make them more aerial in appearance. Only
in man, removed from the gross materialism of
nature, and in whom has been developed the high-
est faculties of the mind, do we see the full beauty
and significance of the blue eye — the eye, that is,

CONCEENING EYES 197

without the interposing cloud of dark pigment
covering it. In the biography of Nathaniel Haw-
thorne, the author says of him: "His eyes were
large, dark-blue, brilliant, and full of varied ex-
pression. Bayard Taylor used to say that they
were the only eyes he ever knew to flash fire. . . .
While he was yet at college, an old gypsy woman,
meeting him suddenly in a woodland path, gazed
at him and asked, —

" 'Are you a man, or an angel?' "

I may say here that gypsies are so accustomed
to concentrate their sight on the eyes of the people
they meet that they acquire a marvelous profi-
ciency in detecting their expression; they study
them with an object, as my friend the gambler
studied the backs of the cards he played with;
without seeing the eyes of their intended dupe
they would be at a loss what to say.

To return to Hawthorne. His wife says in one
of her letters quoted in the book : * t The flame of
his eyes consumed compliment, cant, sham, and
falsehood; while the most wretched sinners — so
many of whom came to confess to him — met in his
glance such a pity and sympathy that they ceased
to be afraid of God and began to return to Him.
... 7 never dared gaze at him, even I, unless his
lids were down."

I think we have, most of us, seen eyes like these
— eyes which one rather avoids meeting, because
when met one is startled by the sight of a naked
human soul brought so near. One person, at least,

198 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

I have known to whom the above description would
apply in every particular; a man whose intellec-
tual and moral nature was of the highest order,
and who perished at the age of thirty, a martyr
to the cause of humanity.

How very strange, then, that savage man should
have been endowed with this eye unsuited to ex-
press the instincts and passions of savages, but
able to express the intelligence, high moral feel-
ings, and spirituality which a humane civilization
was, long ages after, to develop in his torpid
brain! A fact like this seems to fit in with that
flattering, fascinating, ingenious hypothesis in-
vented by Wallace to account for facts which, ac-
cording to the theory of natural selection, ought
not to exist.

In answer to the question, What is the color of
the British eye? so frequently asked, and not yet
definitely settled, I wish, in conclusion, to record
my own observations here. I have remarked a
surprisingly great difference in the eyes of the
two classes into which the population is practically
divisible — the well-to-do class and the poor. I
began my observations in London — there is no bet-
ter place ; and my simple plan was to walk along
the most frequented streets and thoroughfares,
observing the eyes of every person that passed
me. My sight being good, even the very brief
glance, which was all that could be had in most
cases, was sufficient for my purpose; and in this

CONCERNING EYES 199

way hundreds of pairs of eyes could be seen in the
course of a day. In Cheapside the population
seemed too mixed; but in Piccadilly, and Bond
Street, and along Eotten Row, during the season,
it appeared safe to set down a very large majority
of the pedestrians as belonging to the prosperous
class. There are other streets and thoroughfares
in London where very nearly all the people seen
in it at any time are of the working class. I also
frequently strolled up and down the long streets,
where the poor do their marketing on Saturday
evenings, and when, owing to the slow rate of
progress, their features can be easily studied.

To take the better class first. I think it would
puzzle any stranger, walking in Piccadilly or along
the Row on a spring afternoon, to say what the
predominant color of the English eye is, so great
is the variety. Every shade of gray and blue,
from the faint cerulean of a pale sky, to the ultra-
marine, called purple and violet, and which looks
black ; and every type and shade of the dark eye,
from the lightest hazel and the yellowish tint re-
sembling that of the sheep's iris, to the deepest
browns, and the iris of liquid jet with ruddy and
orange reflections in it — the tortoiseshell eye and
chief glory of the negro woman. Another surpris-
ing fact was the large proportion of fine eyes. For
this variety and excellence several explanations
might be given, not one of which would probably
seem quite satisfactory; I therefore leave the
reader to form his own theory on the subject.

200 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

In the lower class no such difficulty appeared.
Here, in a very large majority of cases — about
eighty per cent. I think — the eye was gray, or
gray-blue, but seldom pure. The impurity was
caused by a small quantity of pigment, as I could
generally see by looking closely at the iris, a yel-
lowish tinge being visible round the pupil. My
conclusion was, that this impure gray eye is the
typical British eye at the present time; that it is
becoming pigmented, and will probably, if the race
endures long enough, become dark.

CHAPTEE Xin
THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA

NEAE the end of Darwin's famous narrative of
the voyage of the Beagle there is a passage
which, for me, has a very special interest and sig-
nificance. It is as follows, and the italicization is
mine : — * ' In calling up images of the past, I find
the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my
eyes ; yet these plains are pronounced by all to be
most wretched and useless. They are character-
ized only by negative possessions ; without habita-
tions, without water, without trees, without moun-
tains, they support only a few dwarf plants. Why,
then — and the case is not peculiar to myself —
have these arid wastes taken so firm possession
of my mind? Why have not the still more level,
the greener and more fertile pampas, which are
serviceable to mankind, produced an equal impres-
sion 1 I can scarcely analyze these feelings, but it
must be partly owing to the free scope given to the
imagination. The plains of Patagonia are bound-
less, for they are scarcely practicable, and hence
unknown; they bear the stamp of having thus
lasted for ages, and there appears no limit to their
duration through future time. If, as the ancients

201

202 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an im-
passable breadth of water, or by deserts heated to
an intolerable excess, who would not look at these
last boundaries to man 's knowledge with deep but
ill-defined sensations ? ' '

That he did not in this passage hit on the right
explanation of the sensations he experienced in
Patagonia, and of the strength of the impressions
it made on his mind, I am quite convinced ; for the
thing is just as true of to-day as of the time, in
1836, when he wrote that the case was not peculiar
to himself. Yet since that date — which now,
thanks to Darwin, seems so remote to the natural-
ist— those desolate regions have ceased to be im-
practicable, and, although still uninhabited and
uninhabitable, except to a few nomads, they are no
longer unknown. During the last twenty years
the country has been crossed in various directions,
from the Atlantic to the Andes, and from the Eio
Negro to the Straits of Magellan, and has been
found all barren. The mysterious illusive city,
peopled by whites, which was long believed to
exist in the unknown interior, in a valley called
Trapalanda, is to moderns a myth, a mirage of
the mind, as little to the traveler's imagination as
the glittering capital of great Manoa, which
Alonzo Pizarro and his false friend Orellana failed
to discover. The traveler of to-day really expects
to see nothing more exciting than a solitary huan-
aco keeping watch on a hill-top, and a few gray-
plumaged rheas flying from him, and, possibly, a

i THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 203

band of long-haired roving savages, with their
faces painted black and red. Yet, in spite of ac-
curate knowledge, the old charm still exists in all
its freshness; and after all the discomforts and
sufferings endured in a desert cursed with eternal
barrenness, the returned traveler finds in after
years that it still keeps its hold on him, that it
shines brighter in memory, and is dearer to him
than any other region he may have visited.

We know that the more deeply our feelings are
moved by any scene the more vivid and lasting
will its image be in memory — a fact which ac-
counts for the comparatively unfading character
of the images that date back to the period of child-
hood, when we are most emotional. Judging from
my own case, I believe that we have here the secret
of the persistence of Patagonian images, and their
frequent recurrence in the minds of many who
have visited that gray, monotonous, and, in one
sense, eminently uninteresting region. It is not
the effect of the unknown, it is not imagination;
it is that nature in these desolate scenes, for a
reason to be guessed at by-and-by, moves us more
deeply than in others. In describing his rambles
in one of the most desolate spots in Patagonia,
Darwin remarks: "Yet, in passing over these
scenes, without one bright object near, an ill-de-
fined but strong sense of pleasure is vividly ex-
cited." When I recall a Patagonian scene, it
comes before me so complete in all its vast extent,
with all its details so clearly outlined, that, if I

204 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

were actually gazing on it, I could scarcely see it
more distinctly; yet other scenes, even those that
were beautiful and sublime, with forest, and ocean,
and mountain, and over all the deep blue sky and
brilliant sunshine of the tropics, appear no longer
distinct and entire in memory, and only become
more broken and clouded if any attempt is made to
regard them attentively. Here and there I see a
wooded mountain, a grove of palms, a flowery tree,
green waves dashing on a rocky shore — nothing
but isolated patches of bright color, the parts of
the picture that have not faded on a great blurred
canvas, or series of canvases. These last are
images of scenes which were looked on with won-
der and admiration — feelings which the Patagon-
ian wastes could not inspire — but the gray, mo-
notonous solitude woke other and deeper feelings,
and in that mental state the scene was indelibly
impressed on the mind.

I spent the greater part of one winter at a point
on the Kio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from
the sea, where the valley on my side of the water
was about five miles wide. The valley alone was
habitable, where there was water for man and
beast, and a thin soil producing grass and grain;
it is perfectly level, and ends abruptly at the foot
of the bank or terrace-like formation of the higher
barren plateau. It was my custom to go out every
morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed
by one dog, to ride away from the valley ; and no
sooner would I climb the terrace and plunge into

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 205

the gray universal thicket, than I would find my-
self as completely alone and cut off from all sight
and sound of human occupancy as if five hundred
instead of only five miles separated me from the
hidden green valley and river. So wild and soli-
tary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretch-
ing away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by
man, and where the wild animals are so few that
they have made no discoverable path in the wilder-
ness of thorns. There I might have dropped down
and died, and my flesh been devoured by birds, and
my bones bleached white in sun and wind, and no
person would have found them, and it would have
been forgotten that one had ridden forth in the
morning and had not returned. Or if, like the few
wild animals there — puma, huanaco, and hare-
like dolichotis, or Darwin's rhea and the crested
tinamou among the birds — I had been able to exist
without water, I might have made myself a hermi-
tage of brushwood or dug-out in the side of a cliff,
and dwelt there until I had grown gray as the
stones and trees around me, and no human foot
would have stumbled on my hiding-place.

Not once, nor twice, nor thrice, but day after
day I returned to this solitude, going to it in the
morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it
only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun
compelled me. And yet I had no object in going —
no motive which could be put into words; for
although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
shoot — the shooting was all left behind in the val-

206 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

ley. Sometimes a dolichotis, starting up at my ap-
proach, flashed for one moment on my sight, to
vanish the next moment in the continuous thicket ;
or a covey of tinamous sprang rocket-like into the
air, and fled away with long wailing notes and
loud whir of wings; or on some distant hill-side
a bright patch of yellow, of a deer that was watch-
ing me, appeared and remained motionless for
two or three minutes. But the animals were few,
and sometimes I would pass an entire day with-
out seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more
than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at
that time was cheerless, generally with a gray
film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak
wind, often cold enough to make my bridle hand
feel quite numb. Moreover, it was not possible
to enjoy a canter; the bushes grew so close to-
gether that it was as much as one could do to
pass through at a walk without brushing against
them; and at this slow pace, which would have
seemed intolerable in other circumstances, I would
ride about for hours at a stretch. In the scene
itself there was nothing to delight the eye. Every-
where through the light, gray mold, gray as ashes
and formed by the ashes of myriads of genera-
tions of dead trees, where the wind had blown
on it, or the rain had washed it away, the under-
lying yellow sand appeared, and the old ocean-
polished pebbles, dull red, and gray, and green,
and yellow. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly
ride to its summit, and stand there to survey

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA

WAKENING AT DA\VN

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 207

the prospect. On every side it stretched away in
great undulations; but the undulations were wild
and irregular; the hills were rounded and cone-
shaped, they were solitary and in groups and
ranges; some sloped gently, others were ridge-
like and stretched away in league-long terraces,
with other terraces beyond; and all alike were
clothed in the gray everlasting thorny vegetation.
How gray it all was ! hardly less so near at hand
than on the haze-wrapped horizon, where the hills
were dim and the outline blurred by distance.
Sometimes I would see the large eagle-like, white-
breasted buzzard, Buteo erythronotus, perched on
the summit of a bush half a mile away; and so
long as it would continue stationed motionless
before me my eyes would remain involuntarily
fixed on it, just as one keeps his eyes on a bright
light shining in the gloom; for the whiteness of
the hawk seemed to exercise a fascinating power
on the vision, so surpassingly bright was it by
contrast in the midst of that universal unrelieved
grayness. Descending from my look-out, I would
take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit
other elevations to gaze on the same landscape
from another point; and so on for hours, and
at noon I would dismount and sit or lie on my
folded poncho for an hour or longer. One day,
in these rambles, I discovered a small grove com-
posed of twenty to thirty trees, about eighteen
feet high, and taller than the surrounding trees.
They were growing at a convenient distance

208 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

apart, and had evidently been resorted to by a
herd of deer or other wild animals for a very
long time, for the boles were polished to a glassy
smoothness with much rubbing, and the ground
beneath was trodden to a floor of clean, loose yel-
low sand. This grove was on a hill differing in
shape from other hills in its neighborhood, so
that it was easy for me to find it on other occa-
sions ; and after a time I made a point of finding
and using it as a resting-place every day at noon.
I did not ask myself why I made choice of that
one spot, sometimes going miles out of my way
to sit there, instead of sitting down under any
one of the millions of trees and bushes covering
the country, on any other hillside. I thought noth-
ing at all about it, but acted unconsciously; only
afterwards, when revolving the subject, it seemed
to me that after having rested there once, each
time I wished to rest again the wish came asso-
ciated with the image of that particular clump of
trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand
beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of
returning, animal-like, to repose at that same spot.
It was perhaps a mistake to say that I would
sit down and rest, since I was never tired : and yet
without being tired, that noonday pause, during
which I sat for an hour without moving, was
strangely grateful. All day the silence seemed
grateful, it was very perfect, very profound.
There were no insects, and the only bird sound —
a feeble chirp of alarm emitted by a small skulking

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 209

wren-like species — was not heard oftener than
two or three times an hour. The only sounds as
I rode were the muffled hoof-strokes of my horse,
scratching of twigs against my boot or saddle-flap,
and the low panting of the dog. And it seemed
to be a relief to escape even from these sounds
when I dismounted and sat down: for in a few
moments the dog would stretch ,his head out on
his paws and go to sleep, and then there would
be no sound, not even the rustle of a leaf. For
unless the wind blows strong there is no flutter-
ing motion and no whisper in the small stiff un-
deciduous leaves; and the bushes stand unmov-
ing as if carved out of stone. One day while lis-
tening to the silence, it occurred to my mind to
wonder what the effect would be if I were to
shout aloud. This seemed at the time a horrible
suggestion of fancy, a "lawless and uncertain
thought" which almost made me shudder, and I
was anxious to dismiss it quickly from my mind.
But during those solitary days it was a rare thing
for any thought to cross my mind; animal forms
did not cross my vision or bird-voices assail my
hearing more rarely. In that novel state of mind
I was in, thought had become impossible. Else-
where I had always been able to think most freely
on horseback; and on the pampas, even in the
most lonely places, my mind was always most ac-
tive when I traveled at a swinging gallop. This
was doubtless habit ; but now, with a horse under
me, I had become incapable of reflection : my mind

210 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

had suddenly transformed itself from a thinking
machine into a machine for some other unknown
purpose. To think was like setting in motion a
noisy engine in my brain; and there was some-
thing there which bade me be still, and I was
forced to obey. My state was one of suspense and
watchfulness: yet I had no expectation of meet-
ing with an adventure, and felt as free from ap-
prehension as I feel now when sitting in a room
in London. The change in me was just as great
and wonderful as if I had changed my identity
for that of another man or animal; but at the
time I was powerless to wonder at or speculate
about it; the state seemed familiar rather than
strange, and although accompanied by a strong
feeling of elation, I did not know it — did not know
that something had come between me and my in-
tellect— until I lost it and returned to my former
self — to thinking, and the old insipid existence.

Such changes in us, however brief in duration
they may be, and in most cases they are very brief,
but which so long as they last seem to affect us
down to the very roots of our being, and come as
a great surprise — a revelation of an unfamiliar
and unsuspected nature hidden under the nature
we are conscious of — can only be attributed to an
instantaneous reversion to the primitive and
wholly savage mental conditions. Probably not
many men exist who would be unable to recall
similar cases in their own experience; but it

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 211

quently happens that the revived instinct is so
purely animal in character and repugnant to our
refined or humanitarian feelings, that it is sedu-
lously concealed and its promptings resisted. In
the military and seafaring vocations, and in lives
of travel and adventure, these sudden and sur-
prising reversions are most frequently experi-
enced. The excitement affecting men going into
battle, which even affects those who are consti-
tutionally timid and will cause them to exhibit a
reckless daring and contempt of danger astonish-
ing to themselves, is a familiar instance. This
instinctive courage has been compared to intoxi-
cation, but it does not, like alcohol, obscure a
man's faculties: on the contrary, he is far more
keenly active to everything going on around him
than the person who keeps perfectly cool. The
man who is coolly courageous in fight has his
faculties in their ordinary condition: the facul-
ties of the man who goes into battle inflamed with
instinctive, joyous excitement are sharpened to a
preternatural keenness.1 When the constitution-
ally timid man has had an experience of this kind
he looks back on the day that brought it to him

*In an article on "Courage," by Lord Wolseley, in the Fort-
nightly Review for August, 1889, there occurs the following pas-
sage, descriptive of the state of mind experienced by men in
fight: — "All maddening pleasures seem to be compressed into
that very short space of time, and yet every sensation experienced
in those fleeting moments is so indelibly impressed on the brain
that not even the most trifling incident is ever forgotten in after
life. ' '

212 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

as the happiest he has known, one that stands out
brightly and shines with a strange glory among
his days.

When we are suddenly confronted with any
terrible danger, the change of nature we undergo
is equally great. In some cases fear paralyzes
us, and, like animals, we stand still, powerless to
move a step in flight, or to lift a hand in defense
of our lives; and sometimes we are seized with
panic, and, again, act more like the inferior ani-
mals than rational beings. On the other hand,
frequently in cases of sudden extreme peril, which
cannot be escaped by flight, and must be instantly
faced, even the most timid men at once, as if by
miracle, become possessed of the necessary cour-
age, sharp, quick apprehension, and swift de-
cision. This is a miracle very common in nature ;
man and the inferior animals alike, when con-
fronted with almost certain death " gather reso-
lution from despair.'* We are accustomed to call
this the " courage of despair"; but there can
really be no trace of so debilitating a feeling in
the person fighting, or prepared to fight, for dear
life. At such times the mind is clearer than it
has ever been ; the nerves are steel ; there is noth-
ing felt but a wonderful strength and fury and
daring. Looking back at certain perilous mo-
ments in my own life, I remember them with a
kind of joy; not that there was any joyful ex-
citement then, but because they brought me a new
experience — a new nature, as it were — and lifted

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 213

me for a time above myself. And yet, comparing
myself with other men, I find that on ordinary
occasions my courage is rather below than above
the average. And probably this instinctive cour-
age, which flashes out so brightly on occasions, is
inherited by a very large majority of the male
children born into the world ; only in civilized life
the exact conjuncture of circumstances needed to
call it into activity rarely occurs.

In hunting, again, instinctive impulses come
very much to the surface. Leech caricatured Gal-
lic ignorance of fox-hunting in England when he
made his French gentleman gallop over the
hounds and dash away to capture the fox him-
self ; but the sketch may be also taken as a comic
illustration of a feeling that exists in every one
of us. If any sportsman among my readers has
ever been confronted with some wild animal — a
wild dog, a pig, or cat, let us say — when he had
no firearm or other weapon to kill it in the usual
civilized way, and has nevertheless attacked it,
driven by a sudden uncontrollable impulse, with
a hunting knife, or anything that came to hand,
and has succeeded in slaying it, I would ask such
a one whether this victory did not give him a
greater satisfaction than all his other achieve-
ments in the field? After it, all legitimate sport
would seem illegitimate, and whole hecatombs of
hares and pheasants, and even large animals,
fallen before Ms gun, would only stir in him a
feeling of disgust and self-contempt. He would

214 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

probably hold his tongue about a combat of that
brutal kind, but all the same he would gladly
remember how in some strange, unaccountable
way he suddenly became possessed of the daring,
quickness, and certitude necessary to hold his
wily, desperate foe in check, to escape its fangs
and claws, and finally to overcome it. Above all,
he would remember the keen feeling of savage
joy experienced in the contest. This would make
all ordinary sport seem insipid; to kill a rat in
some natural way would seem better to him than
to murder elephants scientifically from a safe dis-
tance. The feeling occasionally bursts out in the
Story of My Heart: "To shoot with a gun is noth-
ing. . . . Give me an iron mace that I may crush
the savage beast and hammer him down. A spear
to thrust him through with, so that I may feel the
long blade enter, and the push of the shaft."
And more in the same strain, shocking to some,
perhaps, but showing that gentle Richard Jeffe-
ries had in him some of the elements of a fine
barbarian.

But it is in childhood and boyhood, when in-
stincts are nearest to the surface, and ready when
occasion serves to spring into activity. Inherited
second nature is weakest then ; and habit has not
progressed far in weaving its fine network of re-
straining influences over the primitive nature.
The network is continually being strengthened in
the individual's life, and, in the end he is cased,
like the caterpillar, in an impervious cocoon ; only,

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 215

as we have seen, there are in life miraculous mo-
ments when the cocoon suddenly dissolves, or be-
comes transparent, and he is permitted to see him-
self in his original nakedness. The delight which
children experience on entering woods and other
wild places is very keen; and this feeling, al-
though it diminishes as we advance in life, re-
mains with us to the last. Equally great is their
delight at finding wild fruits, honey, and other
natural food; and even when not hungry they
will devour it with strange zest. They will gladly
feast on sour, acrid fruits, which at table, and
picked in the garden, would only excite disgust.
This instinctive seeking for food, and the delight
experienced in finding it, occasionally comes up
in very unexpected and surprising ways. "As
I came through the wood," says Thoreau, "I
caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across
my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage de-
light, and was strongly tempted to seize and de-
vour him raw ; not that I was hungry then, except
for the wildness which he represented."

In almost all cases — those in which danger is en-
countered and rage experienced being exceptions
— the return to an instinctive or primitive state
of mind is accompanied by this feeling of elation,
which, in the very young, rises to an intense glad-
ness, and sometimes makes them mad with joy,
like animals newly escaped from captivity. And,
for a similar reason, the civilized life is one of
continual repression, although it may not seem

216 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

so until a glimpse of nature's wildness, a taste
of adventure, an accident, suddenly makes it seem
unspeakably irksome; and in that state we feel
that our loss in departing from nature exceeds
our gain.

It was elation of this kind, the feeling experi-
enced on going back to a mental condition we
have outgrown, which I had in the Patagonian
solitude; for I had undoubtedly gone back; and
that state of intense watchfulness, or alertness
rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual
faculties, represented the mental state of the pure
savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a
surer guide in his instinct; he is in perfect har-
mony with nature, and is nearly on a level, men-
tally, with the wild animals he preys on, and
which in their turn sometimes prey on him. If
the plains of Patagonia affect a person in this
way, even in a much less degree than in my case,
it is not strange that they impress themselves so
vividly on the mind, and remain fresh in memory,
and return frequently; while other scenery, how-
ever grand or beautiful, fades gradually away,
and is at last forgotten. To a slight, in most
cases probably a very slight, extent, all natural
sights and sounds affect us in the same way ; but
the effect is often transitory, and is gone with
the first shock of pleasure, to be followed in some
cases by a profound and mysterious melancholy.
The greenness of earth ; forest and river and hill ;
the blue haze and distant horizon; shadows of

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 217

clouds sweeping over the sun-flushed landscape
— to see it all is like returning to a home, which
is more truly our home than any habitation we
know. The cry of the wild bird pierces us to the
heart; we have never heard that cry before, and
it is more familiar to us than our mother's voice.
"I heard," says Thoreau, "a robin in the dis-
tance, the first I had heard for many a thousand
years, methought, whose note I shall not forget
for many a thousand more, — the same sweet and
powerful song as of yore. 0 the evening robin!"
Hafiz sings: —

O breeze of the morning blow me a memory of the ancient time;
If after a thousand years thy odors should float o'er my dust,
My bones, full of gladness uprising, would dance in the sepuleher!

And we ourselves are the living sepulchers of a
dead past — that past which was ours for so many
thousands of years before this life of the present
began; its old bones are slumbering in us — dead,
and yet not dead nor deaf to Nature's voices; the
noisy burn, the roar of the waterfall, and thunder
of long waves on the shore, and the sound of rain
and whispering winds in the multitudinous leaves,
bring it a memory of the ancient time; and the
bones rejoice and dance in their sepuleher.

Professor W. K. Parker, in his work On Mam-
malian Descent, speaking of the hairy covering al-
most universal in this class of animals, says :
"This has become, as every one knows, a custom
among the race of men, and shows, at present, no

218 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

sign of becoming obsolete. Moreover, that first
correlation, namely, milk-glands and a hairy cov-
ering, appears to have entered the very soul of
creatures of this class, and to have become psychi-
cal as well as physical, for in that type, which is
only inferior to the angels, the fondness for this
kind of outer covering is a strong and ineradicable
passion." I am not sure that this view accords
with some facts in our experience, and with some
instinctive feelings which we all have. Like Wa-
terton I have found that the feet take very kindly
to the earth, however hot or cold or rough it may
be, and that shoes, after being left off for a short
time, seem as uncomfortable as a mask. The face
is always uncovered ; why does the supposed cor-
relation not apply to this part? The face is pleas-
antly warm when the too delicate body shivers
with cold under its covering; and pleasantly cool
when the sun shines hot on us. When the wind
strikes us on a hot day, or during violent exer-
cise, the sensation to the face is extremely agree-
able, but far from agreeable to the body where
the covering does not allow the moisture to evapo-
rate rapidly. The umbrella has not entered the
soul — not yet ; but it is miserable to get wet in the
rain, yet pleasant to feel the rain on the face. "I
am all face, ' ' the naked American savage said, to
explain why he felt no discomfort from the bleak
wind which made his civilized fellow-traveler
shiver in his furs. Again, what a relief, what a
pleasure, to throw off the clothes when occasion

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 219

permits. Leigh Hunt wrote an amusing paper
on the pleasures of going to bed, when the legs,
long separated by unnatural clothing, delightedly
rub against and renew their acquaintance with one
another. Every one knows the feeling. If it were
convenient, and custom not so tyrannical, many
of us would be glad to follow Benjamin Frank-
lin's example, and rise not to dress, but to settle
comfortably down to our morning's work, with
nothing on. When, for the first time, in some re-
gion where nothing but a fig-leaf has ' ' entered the,
soul," we see men and women going about naked
and unashamed, we experience a slight shock ; but
it has more pleasure than pain in it, although we
are reluctant to admit the pleasure, probably be-
cause we mistake the nature of the feeling. If,
after seeing them for a few days in their native
simplicity, our new friends appear before us1
clothed, we are shocked again, and this time dis-
agreeably so ; it is like seeing those who were free
and joyous yesterday now appear with fettered
feet and sullen downcast faces.

To leave this question; what has truly entered
our soul and become psychical is our environment
— that wild nature in which and to which we were
born at an inconceivably remote period, and which
made us what we are. It is true that we are emi-
nently adaptive, that we have created, and exist
in some sort of harmony with new conditions,
widely different from those to which we were
originally adapted; but the old harmony was in-

220 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

finitely more perfect than the new, and if there
be such a thing as historical memory in us, it is
not strange that the sweetest moment in any life,
pleasant or dreary, should be when Nature draws
near to it, and, taking up her neglected instru-
ment, plays a fragment of some ancient melody,
long unheard on the earth.

It might be asked : If nature has at times this
peculiar effect on us, restoring instantaneously
the old vanished harmony between organism and
environment, why should it be experienced in a*
greater degree in the Patagonian desert than in
other solitary places, — a desert which is water-
less, where animal voices are seldom heard, and
vegetation is gray instead of green? I can only
suggest a reason for the effect being so much
greater in my own case. In sub-tropical woods
and thickets, and in wild forests in temperate re-
gions, the cheerful verdure and bright colors of
flower and insects, if we have acquired a habit of
looking closely at these things, and the melody and
noises of bird-life engages the senses; there is
movement and brightness ; new forms, animal and
vegetable, are continually appearing, curiosity
and expectation are excited, and the mind is so
much occupied with novel objects that the effect
of wild nature in its entirety is minimized. In
Patagonia the monotony of the plains, or expanse
of low hills, the universal unrelieved grayness of
everything, and the absence of animal forms and
objects new to the eye, leave the mind open and

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 221

free to receive an impression of visible nature as
a whole. One gazes on the prospect as on the sea,
for it stretches away sea-like, without change, into
infinitude; but without the sparkle of water, the
changes of hue which shadows and sunlight and
nearness and distance give, and motion of waves
and white flash of foam. It has a look of an-
tiquity, of desolation, of eternal peace, of a desert
that has been a desert from of old and will con-
tinue a desert for ever ; and we know that its only
human inhabitants are a few wandering savages,
who live by hunting as their progenitors have
done for thousands of years. Again, in fertile
savannahs and pampas there may appear no signs
of human occupancy, but the traveler knows that
eventually the advancing tide of humanity will
come with its flocks and herds, and the ancient
silence and desolation will be no more; and this
thought is like human companionship, and miti-
gates the effect of nature's wildness on the
spirit. In Patagonia no such thought or dream
of the approaching changes to be wrought by hu-
man agency can affect the mind. There is no
water there, the arid soil is sand and gravel — peb-
bles rounded by the action of ancient seas, before
Europe was ; and nothing grows except the barren
things that nature loves — thorns, and a few woody
herbs, and scattered tufts of wiry bitter grass.
Doubtless we are not all affected in solitude by
wild nature in the same degree ; even in the Pata-
gonian wastes many would probably experience no

222 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

such mental change as I have described. Others
have their instincts nearer to the surface, and
are moved deeply by nature in any solitary place ;
and I imagine that Thoreau was such a one. At
all events, although he was without the Darwinian
lights which we have, and these feelings were
always to him "strange," "mysterious," "unac-
countable, ' ' he does not conceal them. This is the
"something uncanny in Thoreau" which seems in-
explicable and startling to such as have never been
startled by nature, nor deeply moved ; but which,
to others, imparts a peculiarly delightful aro-
matic flavor to his writings. It is his wish towards
a more primitive mode of life, his strange aban-
donment when he scours the wood like a half-
starved hound, and no morsel could be too sav-
age for him; the desire to take a ranker hold on
life and live more as the animals do ; the sympathy
with nature so keen that it takes his breath away ;
the feeling that all the elements were congenial
to him, which made the wildest scenes unaccount-
ably familiar, so that he came and went with a
strange liberty in nature. Once only he had
doubts, and thought that human companionship
might be essential to happiness; but he was at
the same time conscious of a slight insanity in the
mood; and he soon again became sensible of the
sweet beneficent society of nature, of an infinite
and unaccountable friendliness all at once like
an- atmosphere sustaining him.
In the limits of a chapter it is impossible to do

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 223

more than touch the surface of so large a subject
as that of the instincts and remains of instincts
existing in us. Dr. Wallace doubts that there are
any human instincts, even in the perfect savage;
which seems strange in so keen an observer, and
one who has lived so much with nature and un-
civilized men; but it must be borne in mind that
his peculiar theories with regard to man's origin
— the acquisition of large brains, naked body, and
the upright form not through but in spite of natu-
ral selection — would predispose him to take such a
view. My own experience and observation have
led me to a contrary conclusion, and my belief is
that we might learn something by looking more
beneath the hardened crust of custom into the still
burning core. For instance, that experience I had
in Patagonia — the novel state of mind I have de-
scribed— seemed to furnish an answer to a ques-
tion frequently asked with regard to men living
in a state of nature. When we consider that our
intellect, ^unlike that of the inferior animals, is
progressive, how wonderful it seems that commu-
nities and tribes of men should exist — "are con-
tented to exist," we often say, just as if they had
any choice in the matter — for ages and for thou-
sands of years in a state of pure barbarism, living
from hand to mouth, exposed to extremes of tem-
perature, and to frequently-recurring famine even
in the midst of the greatest fertility, when a lit-
tle foresight — "the smallest amount of intelli-
gence possessed by the lowest of mankind," we

224 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

say — would be sufficient to make their condition
immeasurably better. If, in the wild natural life,
their normal state is like that into which I tem-
porarily fell, then it no longer appears strange to
me that they take no thought for the morrow, and
remain stationary, and are only a little removed
from other mammalians, their superiority in
this respect being only sufficient to counter-
balance their physical disadvantages. That in-
stinctive state of the human mind, when the
higher faculties appear to be non-existent, a
state of intense alertness and preparedness,
which compels the man to watch and listen
and go silently and stealthily, must be like that of
the lower animals : the brain is then like a highly-
polished mirror, in which all visible nature — every
hill, tree, leaf — is reflected with miraculous clear-
ness ; and we can imagine that if the animal could
think and reason, thought would be superfluous
and a hindrance, since it would dim that bright
perception on which his safety depends.

That is a part, the lesser part, of the lesson I
learnt in the Patagonian solitude : the second
larger part must be cut very short ; for on all sides
it leads to other questions, some of which would
probably be thought "more curious than edify-
ing." That hidden fiery core is nearer to us than
we ordinarily imagine, and its heat still permeates
the crust to keep us warm. This is, no doubt, a
matter of annoyance and even grief to those who
grow impatient at Nature's unconscionable slow-

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 225

ness; who wish to be altogether independent of
such an underlying brute energy ; to live on a cool
crust and rapidly grow angelic. But, as things
are, it is, perhaps, better to be still, for a while, a
little lower than the angels: we are hardly in a
position just yet to dispense with the unangelic
qualities, even in this exceedingly complex state,
in which we appear to be so effectually ' ' hedged in
from harm." I recall here an incident witnessed
by a friend of mine of an Indian he and his fellow-
soldiers were pursuing who might easily have
escaped unharmed; but when his one companion
was thrown to the ground through his horse fall-
ing, the first Indian turned deliberately, sprang
to the earth, and, standing motionless by the
other's side, received the white men's bullets. Not
for love — it would be absurd to suppose such a
thing — but inspired by that fierce instinctive spirit
of defiance which in some cases will actually cause
a man to go out of his way to seek death. Why
are we, children of light — the light which makes
us timid — so strongly stirred by a deed like this,
so useless and irrational, and feel an admiration
so great that compared with it that which is called
forth by the noblest virtue, or the highest achieve-
ment of the intellect, seems like a pale dim feel-
ing? It is because in our inmost natures, our
deepest feelings, we are still one with the savage.
We admire a Gordon less for his godlike quali-
ties— his spirituality, and crystal purity of heart,
and justice, and love of his kind — than for that

226 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

more ancient nobility, the qualities lie had in com-
mon with the wild man of childish intellect, an
old Viking, a fighting Colonel Burnaby, a Captain
Webb who madly flings his life away, a vulgar
Welsh prizefighter who enters a den full of growl-
ing lions, and drives them before him like fright-
ened sheep. It is due to this instinctive savage
spirit in us, in spite of our artificial life and all
we have done to rid ourselves of an inconvenient
heritage, that we are capable of so-called heroic
deeds; of cheerfully exposing ourselves to the
greatest privations and hardships, suffering them
stoically, and facing death without blenching, sac-
rificing our lives, as we say, in the cause of hu-
manity, or geography, or some other branch of
science.

It is related that a late aged prime minister of
England on one occasion stood for several hours
at his sovereign's side at a reception, in an op-
pressive atmosphere, and suffering excruciating
pains from a gouty foot ; yet making no sign and
concealing his anguish under a smiling counte-
nance. We have been told that this showed his
good blood : that because he came of a good stock,
and had the training and traditional feelings of
a gentleman, he was able to suffer in that calm
way. This pretty delusion quickly vanishes in a
surgical hospital, or on a field covered with
wounded men after a fight. But the savage always
endures pain more stoically than the civilized
man. He is

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 227

Self-balanced against contingencies,
As the trees and animals are.

However great the sufferings of the gouty pre-
mier may have been, they were less than those
which any Indian youth in Guiana and Venezuela
voluntarily subjects himself to before he ventures
to call himself a man, or to ask for a wife. Small
in comparison, yet he did not endure them smil-
ingly because the traditional pride and other feel-
ings of a gentleman made it possible for him to
do so, but because that more ancient and nobler
pride, the stern instinct of endurance of the sav-
age, came to his aid and sustained him.

These things do not, or at all events should not,
surprise us. They can only surprise those who
are without the virile instinct, or who have never
become conscious of it on account of the circum-
stances of their lives. The only wonder is that
the stern indomitable spirit in us should ever in
any circumstances fail a man, that even on the
scaffold or with the world against him he should
be overcome by despair, and burst into weak tears
and lamentations, and faint in the presence of his
fellows. In one of the most eloquent passages of
his finest work Herman Melville describes as fol-
lows that manly spirit or instinct in us, and the
effect produced on us by the sight of its failure:
"Men may seem detestable as joint-stock compa-
nies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers
there may be; men may have mean and meager
faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so

228 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that
over any ignominious blemish in him all his fel-
lows should run to throw their costliest robes.
That immaculate manliness we feel in ourselves —
so far within us that it remains intact though all
the outer character seems gone — bleeds with keen-
est anguish at the spectacle of a valor-ruined
man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful
sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the
permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat
of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but the
abounding dignity which has no robed investiture.
Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a
pick and drives a spike; that democratic dignity
which, on all hands, radiates without end from
God Himself."

There is then something to be said in favor of
this animal and primitive nature in us. Thoreau,
albeit so spiritually-minded, could yet "rever-
ence" that lower nature in him which made him
brother to the brute. He experienced and fully
appreciated its tonic effect. And until we get a
better civilization more equal in its ameliorating
effect on all classes — if there must be classes—
and more likely to endure, it is perhaps a fortu-
nate thing that we have so far failed to eliminate
the "savage" in us — the "Old Man" as some
might prefer to call it. Not a respectable Old
Man, but a very useful one occasionally, when we
stand in sore need of his services and he comes
promptly and unsummoned to our aid.

CHAPTER XIV

THE PERFUME OF AN EVENING
PRIMROSE

T SOMETIMES walk in a large garden where
* the evening primrose is permitted to grow,
but only at the extreme end of the ground, thrust
away, as it were, back against the unkept edge
with its pretty tangle of thorn, briar, and wood-
bine, to keep company there with a few straggling
poppies, with hollyhock, red and white foxglove,
and other coarse and weed-like plants, all togeth-
er forming a kind of horizon, dappled with color,
to the garden on that side, a suitable background
to the delicate more valued blooms. It has a neg-
lected appearance, its tall straggling stems insuffi-
ciently clothed with leaves, leaning away from
contact with the hedge; a plant of somewhat
melancholy aspect, suggesting to a fanciful mind
the image of a maiden originally intended by Na-
ture to be her most perfect type of grace and
ethereal loveliness, but who soon out-grew her
strength with all beauty of form, and who now
wanders abroad, careless of appearances, in a
faded flimsy garment, her fair yellow hair dis-

229

230 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

heveled, her mournful eyes fixed ever on the earth
where she will shortly be.

I never pass this weedy, pale-flowered alien
without stooping to thrust my nose into first one
blossom then another, and still another, until that
organ, like some industrious bee, is thickly pow-
dered with the golden dust. If, after an interval,
I find myself once more at the same spot, I repeat
this performance with as much care as if it was
a kind of religious ceremony it would not be safe
to omit ; and at all times I am as reluctant to pass
without approaching my nose to it, as the great
Dr. Johnson was to pass a street-post without
touching it with his hand. My motive, however,
is not a superstitious one, nor is it merely one of
those meaningless habits which men sometimes
contract, and of which they are scarcely conscious.
When I first knew the evening primrose, where it
is both a wild and a garden flower and very com-
mon, I did not often smell at it, but was satisfied
to inhale its subtle fragrance from the air. And
this reminds me that in England it does not per-
fume the air as it certainly does on the pampas of
La Plata, in the early morning in places where it
is abundant; here its fragrance, while unchanged
in character, has either become less volatile or so
diminished in quantity that one is not sensible
that the flower possesses a perfume until he ap-
proaches his nose to it.

My sole motive in smelling the evening prim-
rose is the pleasure it gives me. This pleasure

EVENING PRIMROSE

PERFUME OF AN EVENING PRIMROSE 231

greatly surpasses that which I receive from other
flowers far more famous for their fragrance, for
it is in a great degree mental, and is due to asso-
ciation. Why is this pleasure so vivid, so im-
measurably greater than the mental pleasure af-
forded by the sight of the flower? The books tell
us that sight, the most important of our senses,
is the most intellectual; while smell, the least im-
portant, is in man the most emotional sense. This
is a very brief statement of the fact; I will now
restate it another way and more fully.

I am now holding an evening primrose in my
hand. As a fact at this moment I am holding
nothing but the pen with which I am writing this
chapter; but I am supposing myself back in the
garden, and holding the flower that first suggested
this train of thought. I turn it about this way and
that, and although it pleases it does not delight,
does not move me: certainly I do not think very
highly of its beauty, although it is beautiful;
placed beside the rose, the fuchsia, the azalea, or
the lily, it would not attract the eye. But it is a
link with the past, it summons vanished scenes to
my mind. I recognize that the plant I plucked it
from possesses a good deal of adaptiveness, a
quality one would scarcely suspect from seeing it
only in an English garden. Thus I remember that
I first knew it as a garden flower, that it grew
large, on a large plant, as here; that on summer
evenings I was accustomed to watch its slim, pale,
yellow buds unfold, and called it, when speaking in

232 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Spanish, by its quaint native name of James of
the night, and, in English, primrose simply. I re-
call with a smile that it was a shock to my child-
ish mind to learn that our primrose was not the
primrose. Then, I remember, came the time when
I could ride out over the plain ; and it surprised me
to discover that this primrose, unlike the four-
o 'clock and morning-glory, and other evening flow-
ers in our garden, was also a wild flower. I knew
it by its unmistakable perfume, but on those
plains, where the grass was cropped close, the
plant was small, only a few inches high, and the
flowers no bigger than buttercups. Afterwards I
met with it again in the swampy woods and ever-
glades along the Plata Eiver; and there it grew
tall and rank, five or six feet high in some cases,
with large flowers that had only a faint perfume.
Still later, going on longer expeditions, sometimes
with cattle, I found it in extraordinary abundance
on the level pampas south of the Salado River;
there it was a tall slender plant, grass-like among
the tall grasses, with wide open flowers about an
inch in diameter, and not more than two or three
on each plant. Finally, I remember that on first
landing in Patagonia, on a desert part of the coast,
the time being a little after daybreak, I became
conscious of the familiar perfume in the air, and,
looking about me, discovered a plant growing on
the barren sand not many yards from the sea;
there it grew, low and bush-like in form, with stiff

PERFUME OF AN EVENING PRIMROSE 233

horizontal steins and a profusion of small sym-
metrical flowers.

All this about the plant, and much more, with
many scenes and events of the past, are suggested
to my mind by the flower in my hand; but while
these scenes and events are recalled with pleasure,
it is a kind of mental pleasure that we frequently
experience, and very slight in degree. But when I
approach the flower to my face and inhale its per-
fume, then a shock of keen pleasure is experienced,
and a mental change so great that it is like a
miracle. For a space of time so short that if it
could be measured it would probably be found to
occupy no more than a fraction of a second, I am
no longer in an English garden recalling and con-
sciously thinking about that vanished past, but
during that brief moment time and space seem
annihilated and the past is now. I am again on
the grassy pampas, where I have been sleeping
very soundly under the stars, — would that I could
now sleep as soundly under a roof! It is the
moment of wakening, when my eyes are just open-
ing to the pure over-arching sky, flushed in its
eastern half with tender color ; and at the moment
that nature thus reveals itself to my vision in its
exquisite morning beauty and freshness, I am
sensible of the subtle primrose perfume in the air.
The blossoms are all about me, for miles and for
leagues on that great level expanse, as if the
morning wind had blown them out of that eastern

234 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

sky and scattered their pale yellow stars in mil-
lions over the surface of the tall sere grass.

I do not say that this shock of pleasure I have
described, this vivid reproduction of a long past
scene, is experienced each time I smell the flower ;
it is experienced fully only at long intervals, after
weeks and months, when the fragrance is, so to
speak, new to me, and afterwards in a lesser de-
gree on each repetition, until the feeling is ex-
hausted. If I continue to smell again and again
at the flower, I do it only as a spur to memory;
or in a mechanical way, just as a person might
always walk along a certain path with his eyes
fixed on the ground, remembering that he once
on a time dropped some valuable article there,
and although he knows that it was lost irrecover-
ably, he still searches the ground for it.

Other vegetable odors affect me in a similar
way, but in a very much fainter degree, except in
one or two cases. Thus, the Lombardy poplar was
one of the trees I first became acquainted with in
childhood, and it has ever since been a pleasure
to me to see it; but in spring, when its newly
opened leaves give out their peculiar aroma, for
a moment, when I first smell it, I am actually a
boy again, among the tall poplar trees, their my-
riads of heart-shaped leaves rustling to the hot
November wind, and sparkling like silver in the
brilliant sunshine. More than that, I am in that
visionary moment, clinging fast to the slim verti-
cal branches, high above the earth, forty or fifty

PERFUME OF AN EVENING PEIMROSE 235

feet perhaps ; and just where I have ceased from
climbing, in the cleft of a branch and against the
white bark, I see the dainty little cup-shaped nest
I have been seeking ; and round my head, as I gaze
down in it, delighted at the sight of the small
pearly eggs it contains, flutter the black-headed,
golden-winged siskins, uttering their long canary-
like notes of solicitude. It all comes and goes like
a flash of lightning, but the scene revealed, and the
accompanying feeling, the complete recovery of a
lost sensation, are wonderfully real. Nothing that
we see or hear can thus restore the past. The
sight of the poplar tree, the sound made by the
wind in its summer foliage, the song of the golden-
winged siskins when I meet with them in captivity,
bring up many past scenes to my mind, and among
others the picture I have described; but it is a
picture only, until the fragrance of the poplar
touches the nerve of smell, and then it is some-
thing more.

I have no doubt that my experience is similar to
that of others, especially of those who have lived
a rural life, and whose senses have been trained
by an early-acquired habit of attention. When
we read of Cuvier (and the same thing has been
recorded of others), that the scent of some humble
flower or weed, familiar to him in boyhood, would
always affect him to tears, I presume that the
poignant feeling of grief — grief, that is, for the
loss of a vanished happiness — which ended in
tears, succeeded to some such vivid representation

236 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

of the past as I have described, and to the purely
delightful recovery of a vanished sensation. Not
only flowery and aromatic odors can produce this
powerful effect; it is caused by any smell, not
positively disagreeable, which may be in any way
associated with a happy period in early or past
life: the smell, for instance, of peat smoke, of a
brewery, a tan yard, of cattle and sheep, and
sheep-folds, of burning weeds, brushwood, and
charcoal ; the dank smell of marshes, and the smell,
''ancient and fish-like," that clings about many
seaside towns and villages; also the smell of the
sea itself, and of decaying seaweed, and the dusty
smell of rain in summer, and the smell of new
mown hay, and of stables and of freshly-ploughed
ground, with so many others tfeat every reader
can add to the list from his own experience. Be-
ing so common a thing, it may be thought that I
have dwelt too long on it. My excuse must be
that some things are common without being
familiar ; also that some common things have not
yet been explained.

Locke somewhere says that unless we refresh
ouiVdfiental pictures of what we have seen by look-
ing again at their originals, they fade, and in the
end are lost. Bain appears to have the same opin-
ion, at all events he says : ' ' The simplest impres-
sion that can be made, of taste, smell, touch, hear-
ing, sight, needs repetition in order to endure
of its own accord." Probably it is a fact that
when any scene, not yet lost by the memory, a

PERFUME OF AN EVENING PEIMEOSE 237

house, let us say, is looked at again after a long
interval, it does not, unless seen in a new setting,
create a new image distinct from the old and
faded one, but covers the former image, so to
speak, the preexistent picture, and may therefore,
be said to freshen it. Most of the impressions we
receive are no doubt very transitory, but it is cer-
tainly an error that all our mental pictures, not
freshened in the way described, fade and disap-
pear, since it is in the experience of every one
of us that many mental pictures of scenes looked
at once only, and in some cases only for a few
moments, remain persistently in the mind. But
the remembered scenes or objects do not present
themselves to the mental eye perfect and in their
first vivid colors, except on very rare occasions;
they are like certain old paintings that always
look dark and obscured until a wet sponge is
passed over them, whereupon for a short time
they recover their clearness of outline and bril-
liancy of color. In recalling the past, emotion
plays the part of the wet sponge, and it is excited
most powerfully in us when we encounter, after a
long interval, some once familiar odor associated
in some way with the picture recalled. But\ why?
Not finding an answer in the books, I am compelled
to seek for one, true or false, in the wild&rness of
my own mind.

The reason, I imagine, is that while smells are
so much to us they cannot, like things seen and
things heard, be reproduced in the mind, but are

238 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

at once forgotten. It is true that in the books
smell is classified along with taste, as being much
lower or less intellectual than sight and hearing,
for the reason (scarcely a valid one) that there
must be actual contact of the organ of smell with
the object smelt, or a material emanation from,
and portion of, such object, although the object
itself might be miles away beyond the sight or
even beyond the horizon. The light of nature is
enough to show how false the arrangement is that
places smell and taste together, as much lower
and widely apart from sight and hearing. Bather
the extreme delicacy of the olfactory nerve, raises
smell to the rank of an intellectual sense, but very
little below the two first and higher senses. And
yet, while sights and sounds are retained and can
be reproduced at will, and their phantasms are
like the reality, an odor has no phantasm in the
brain; or, to be very exact, the phantasm of an
odor, or its presentment or representation, is so
faint and quickly gone when any effort is made to
recover it, that, compared with the distinct and
abiding presentments of sights and sounds, it is
as nothing. Imagine, for example, that you had
often seen Windsor Castle, and knew a great deal
about it, its history, its noble appearance, which
will look familiar to you when you see it again and
affect you pleasantly as in the past ; and that yet
you could not see it with the mind's eye, but that
when, after a recent visit, you tried to see it men-
tally, nothing but a formless, dim, whitish patch

PERFUME OF AN EVENING PEIMEOSE 239

appeared, only to disappear in an instant and
come no more. Such a case would represent our
condition with regard to even the strongest and
most familiar smells. Yet in spite of our inability
to recall them, we do distinctly make the effort;
and in the case of some strong odor which we have
recently inhaled the mind mocks us with this faint
shadow of a phantasm; and this vain, or almost
vain, effort of the mind, seems to show that odors
in some past period of our history were so much
more to us than they are now that they could be
vividly reproduced, and that this power has been
lost, or, at all events, is so weakened as to be of
no use.

I find that Bain, who makes different and contra-
dictory statements on this subject in his work on
the Senses and the Intellect, has the following sen-
tence, with which I agree : ' ' By a great effort of
the mind, we may approach very near to the re-
covery of a smell that we have been extremely
familiar with, as, for example, the odor of coffee,
and if we were more dependent on ideas of smell,
we might succeed much better. ' ' A very big if, by
the way; but it is probable that some savages, and
some individuals among us that have a very acute
sense of smell, do succeed much better. This-^sense
being so much more to dogs than to man, it is not
strange that they remember smells rather than
sights, and can reproduce the sensation of smells,
as their twitching and sniffing noses when they
dream seem to show.

240 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

This approach in ourselves to the recovery of a
strong or familiar smell, this dim white patch, to
speak in metaphor, the ghost of a phantasm of a
smell, seems to have misled the philosophers into
the idea that we can mentally reproduce odors.
Bain, as 1 have said, contradicts himself, and
therefore, excepting in the sentence I have quoted,
must be put down among those who are against
me; and with him a*e McCosh, Bastian, Luys,
Ferrier, and others wh-o write on the brain and the
mind. Do they copy from each other ! It is very
odd that they all tell us that we know very little
about the sense of smell, and prove it by affirming
that we can recall the sensations produced by
odors, in some cases quoting the poet :

Odozfs, -when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

I was seriously alarmed at the beginning of this
inquiry by reading in McCosh, "When the organs
of taste and smell, supposed by Ferrier to be at
the back of the head, are diseased or out of order,
the reproduction of the corresponding sensations
may be indistinct." So indistinct was the repro-
duction in my own case, even of the smell of coffee,
that after reading this passage I began to fear
that my own brain had misled me, and so, to sat-
isfy myself on the point, I consulted others, friends
and acquaintances, who all began trying to recall
the sensations produced on them by the odors they
were most familiar with. The result of their

PEEFUME OF AN EVENING PRIMROSE 241

efforts has restored my peace of mind. With the
exception of two or three ladies, who, having no
male relations to make up their minds for them,
profess to be still in doubt, all sadly acknowledged
that they find themselves poorer by one faculty
than they had supposed themselves to be; that
they began trying to recall smells in the belief that
they had the power; that they found that they
could almost do it, then began to doubt, and finally
with a feeling of impotence, of being baffled, gave
it up.

A simple mental experiment may serve to con-
vince any person who tries it that the sensations
of smell do not reproduce themselves in the mind.
We think of a rose, or a lily, or a violet, and a
feeling of pleasure attends the thought; but that
this feeling is caused solely by the image of some-
thing beautiful to the eye becomes evident when
we proceed to think of some artificial perfume, or
extract, or essence of a flower. The extract, we
know, gave us far more pleasure than the slight
perfume of the flower, but there is no feeling of
pleasure in thinking of it : it is nothing more than
an idea in the mind. On the other hand, when we
remember some extremely painful scene that we
have witnessed, or some sound, expressing Dis-
tress or anguish, that we have heard, something
of the distressed feeling experienced at the time is
reproduced in us ; and it is common to hear people
say, It makes me sad, or makes me dizzy, or makes
my blood run cold, when I think of it; which is

242 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

literally true, because in thinking of it they again
(in a sense) see and hear it. But to think of evil
odors does not affect us at all: we can, in imagi-
nation, uncork and sniff at cans of petroleum and
saturate our pocket-handkerchiefs with assafcetida
or carbolic acid, or walk behind a dust-cart, or
wade through miles of fetid slime in some tropical
morass, or take up some mephitic animal, like
the skunk, and fondle it as we would a kitten, yet
experience no pain, and no sensation of nausea.
We can, if we like, call up all the sweet and abom-
inable smells in nature, just as Owen Glendower
called spirits from the vasty deep, but, like the
spirits, they refuse to come ; or they come not as
smells but as ideas, so that phosphuretted hydro-
gen causes no pain, and frangipani no pleasure.
We only know that smells exist; that we have
roughly classified them as fragrant, aromatic,
fresh, ethereal, stimulating, acrid, nauseous, and
virulent ; that each of these generic names includes
a very large number of distinct odors: we know
them all because the mind has taken note of the
distinct character of each, and of its effect on us,
not because it has registered a sensation in our
brain to be reproduced at will, as in the case of
something we have seen or heard.

It is true that we are equally powerless to recall
tastes. Bain admits that "these sensations are
deficient as regards the power of being remem-
bered"; but he did not discover the fact himself,
nor does he verify it from his own experience,

PERFUME OF AN EVENING PEIMEOSE 243

merely telling us that "Longet observes." But
taste is not an emotional sense. I know, for in-
stance, that if I were to partake of some once
familiar, long untasted dish, flavored, let me say,
with some such abomination (to the English pal-
ate) as cummin-seed or garlic; some vegetable, or
fruit, wild or cultivated, that I never see in Eng-
land, it would not move me as I am moved by an
odor, and would perhaps give me less pleasure
than a dish of strawberries and cream. For in
the flavor there is obvious contact with the organ
of taste; it is gross and inseparable from the
thing eaten to supply a bodily want, and gives a
momentary and purely animal gratification ; there-
fore to the mind it is not in the same category, but
very much lower than that invisible, immaterial
something that flies to us, not to give a sensuous
pleasure only, but also to lead, to warn, to instruct,
and call up before the mental eye bright images
of things unseen. Consequently our inability to
recall past flavors is not felt as a loss, and no ef-
fort is made to recover them; they are lost and
were not worth keeping.

This, then, to my mind, is the reason that smell
is an emotional sense in so great a degree, com-
pared with the other senses, — namely, because,
like sight and hearing, it is an intellectual sense,
and because, unlike sight and hearing, its sensa-
tions are forgotten ; and when after a long inter-
val a forgotten odor, once familiar and associated
intimately with the past, is again encountered, the

244 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

sudden, unexpected recovery of a lost sensation
affects us in some such way as the accidental dis-
covery of a store of gold, hidden away by our-
selves in some past period of our life and forgot-
ten ; or as it would affect us to be met face to face
by some dear friend, long absent and supposed to
be dead. The suddenly recovered sensation is
more to us for a moment than a mere sensation;
it is like a recovery of the irrecoverable past. We
are not moved in this way, or at all events not
nearly in the same degree, by seeing objects or
hearing sounds that are associated with and re-
call past scenes, simply because the old familiar
sights and sounds have never been forgotten;
their phantasms have always existed in the brain.
If, for instance, I hear a bird's note that I have
not heard for the last twenty years, it is not as if
I had not really heard it, since I have listened to
it mentally a thousand times during the interval,
and it does not surprise or come to me like some-
thing that was lost and is recovered, and conse-
quently does not move me. And so with the sen-
sation of sight; I cannot think of any fragrant
flower that grows in my distant home without see-
ing it, so that its beauty may always be enjoyed;
— but its fragrance, alas, has vanished and returns
not!

INDEX

ALBINISM, Herman Melville on,
112; why we are unpleasant-
ly affected by, 112, 113.

Animism, Dr. Tylor on, 116.

Anumbius acuticaudatus, nest-
building habits of, 10.

Apple Country, 105.

Armadilloes, 11, 13; bones of,
37; defective sight of, 177.

Arrow-heads, Paleolithic and
Neolithic, 38 ; highly-fin-
ished, 39.

Asturina pucherani, a white-
eyed hawk, 180.

Azara, Felix de, on song birds
in Paraguay, 152, 155.

BACON, on embroidery, 51.

Bain, on duration of sense-im-
pressions, 236, 239, 242.

Bates, on bird music in South
America, 148; on Cypho-
rhinus cantans, 154.

Bird music, in Patagonia, 141;
in South America, 141-157;
difficult to describe, 142-145;
aerial character of, 146-152.

Birds, song, number of species
in South America, 150.

Blackbird, Argentine (Turdus
fuscater), 150.

Brazilians, attack on El Car-
men by, 91-95.

Broca, Dr. Paul, classification
of eyes, 190-191.

Bubo magellanicus, see Owl.

Buffon, a fancy of, 42; on
American song birds, 151.

Burroughs, Mr. John, on Brit-
ish and American song birds,
147.

Buteo erythronotus, conspicu-

ousness of, 207.
Buzzard, white-breasted, 207.

CACHALOTE, 10.

Cacti, fruit of, 47.

Calandria mocking-bird (Mi-
mus modulator), song of,
141-143.

Calodromus elegans, voice and
habits of, 129-131.

Carancho, 169.

Carmen de Patagones, 20; at-
tacked by a Brazilian force,
91-98.

Carrion-hawk (Milvago chi-
mango), 25.

Carter, Dr. Brudenell, on weak
sight in civilized man,
176.

Cathartes atratus, 49.

Cavia australis, bones of, 37.

Chanar tree, 15; fruit of, 47;
flowers of, 48.

Chi-chi, 103.

Children in Patagonia, 45.

Chloephaga magellanica, 77.

Chrysomitris magellanica, see
Siskin.

Colley-dog, character of, 57, 58.

Columba maculosa, depreda-
tions of, 77; song, 121.

Condalia spinosa, fruit of, 47.

Condor, 53.

Conspicuousness, effects of, 113.

Coots, wheat destroyed by, 76.

Courage, instinct of, 211-213.

Cow and pigs, friendship be-
tween, 54, 55.

Coypu (Myiopotamus coypu),
bones of, 37.

245

246

INDEX

Craspedocephalus alternatus,

26.
Ctenomys magellanica, bones

of, 38; habits of, 127-129.
Cusar-leofu, 34.
Cuvier, effect of some odors on,

235.
Cyphorhinus cantans, Bates on,

154.

DAFILA SPINACAUDA, depreda-
tions of, 77.

Darwin, on Craspedocephalus
alternatus, 27 ; on resem-
blance of animals to man,
27; on singing birds in
South America, 141, 152; on
how the mind is affected by
Patagonian scenery, 201.

Dasypus minutus, 11.

Deer, bones of, 37; distant
sight of, 206.

Dendrocolaptid*, 9.

Diuca minor, morning song of,
15, 122.

Dog, native, character of, 57,
58.

Dogs, anecdotes of, 57-71.

Dolichotes patagonica, bones
of, 37; observed watching
me, 139; seen on the uplands,
205.

D'Orbigny, on the flute-bird's
song, 153.

Duck, brown pintail, 77.

Dunes, 5, 12, 13.

EARTHQUAKE, shock of, experi-
enced at El Carmen, 97.

CEcodoma ants, habits of, 133-
138.

Embernagra platensis, see Red-
billed finch.

Escandalosa plant, 137.

Evening primrose, 7 ; fragrance
of, 220 ; adaptiveness of, 232.

Eyes, abnormal color in, 158;
color of in birds, 179: color
of in men, 182; individual

variations in, 182; luminous,
183; owls', 184; green, 189;
Broca's table of colors of,
190; brown, 195; blue, 195;
British, 198-200.

FALCO SPABVEBIUS, nesting in
cliffs, 132, 133.

Felis geoffroyi, 49.

Firewood-gatherer, 10.

Flamingo, shooting a, 63, 64.

Flute-bird, song of, 159.

Fontana, Dr. G., on Indians of
the Pampas and Gran Chaco,
171.

Franklin, Benjamin, a charac-
teristic of, 219.

GAUCHO with abnormal eyes.

158.
Gauchos, dislike to spectacles

of, 160.
Germans, weakness of sight in,

174.

Gould, his collection of hum-
ming-birds, 180.
Greyhounds, hunting on their

own account, 58, 59.
Gums, edible, 46; chewing, 124-

126.
Gurliaca decorticans, see

Chanar.

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL, eyes
of, 197.

Homorus gutturalis, habits of,
10.

Huanaco, bones of, 38.

Humboldt. on eyesight in sav-
ages, 168, 176.

Hunt, Leigh, on the pleasure
of going to bed, 218.

Hunting, instinct of, 213.

ICTERIOE, 150.

Incas, the, rainbow-worship-
ers, 52; knowledge of na-
ture's laws of, 135.

Indian remains, 37-42.

INDEX

247

Indian burial places, 41.

Indians, life among the, 98-
107; eyesight of, 167-169;
life-conditions of the, 170;
Fontana on, 177; Pelleschi
on, 176; instinctive courage,
226 ; capable of heroic ac-
tions, 226; endurance of
pain, 226.

Instincts, human, 209-228; in
children, 214, 215; Dr. Wal-
lace on, 223.

Itaparica, capture of the war-
ship, 95.

JEFFEBIES, RICHARD, instinctive

savage feelings, 214.
Juniper, a gum-bearing, 125.

LA MERCED, 21.

Leaf-cutting ants, 133-138.

Lichenops perspicillata, 189.

Liquorice plant, 7.

Little cock, amusing habits of,

127.

Locke on mental pictures, 235.
Locusts, depredations of, 76.
Lombardy poplar, odor of, 234.

MAKEN, 125.

Manzanas, Las, 103.

Marti neta, 46.

Melville. Herman, on the qual-
ity of whiteness, 109-115; on
valor, 227.

Mendoza, destruction of, 97.

Migration, 5-6.

Military starling, 122.

Milky sea, a, 118.

Mill, J. S.. a doctrine of, 80.

Milvago chimango, see Carrion-
hawk.

Mimus modulator, see Calan-
dria mocking-bird.

Missionary Society, South
American, 29.

Moby Dick, H. Melville's, 109.

Mocking-bird, Patagonian, 9,

126, 141; white-banded, 120;

calandria, 141-142.
Mocking-birds, 150.
Myiopotamus coypu, see Coypu.

NIGHTINGALE, melody of, 144.
Nothura darwini, eggs of, 46.

OCTJLTO, habits of, 128.
Organ-bird, Bates on the, 154.
Ostriches, god of the, 120.
Owl, Magellanic eagle, 184-
187.

PABKEB, Prof. W. K., on cloth-
ing, 217.

Parrots in Patagonia, 132.

Patagonia, first sight of, 5-7;
legends, 5-7 ; salubrious cli-
mate of, 123, 124; explored,
202 ; Darwin on plains of,
201; secret of charm of, 203;
description of scenery of,
204-208.

Peccary, bones of, 37.

Pelleschi on Gran Chaco In-
dians, 176.

Phytotoma rutila, see Plant-
cutter.

Picture puzzles, 172.

Pigeons, rock, resting in cliff,
132.

Pigs and cow, friendship be-
tween, 55, 56.

Piquellin, 47.

Plant-cutter (Phytotoma ru-
tila) , habits of, 9.

Polar bear, man's fear of, 111,
119.

Polybori, 49.

Polyborus tharus, flight of,
169.

Primitive Culture, Dr. Tyler's
116.

Progne furcata, description of,
31; migration of, 33.

Puma, a tree-climber, 49;
abundant on the Rio Negro,
76; depredations of, 76.

248

INDEX

RAINBOW, a brilliant, 50-53.
Realejo, song of, 154.
Red-billed finch (Embernagra

platensis), 25.
Resemblance of inferior ani-

mals to man, 27.
Resemblances, imitative and

protective in nature, 172-173.
Retriever, character of the, 59,

60; account of a, 61-71.
Revolver accident, 22.
Rhea, bones of, 38; a white,

120.
Rhinocrypta lanceolata, amus-

ing habits of, 127.
Rio Negro, first sight of, 16;

color of, 35; valley of the,

35, 36; psychological effect

of the, 42-46, 48; extraordi-

nary sunset effect on, 52.

HUMBOLDTIANA, 48.

Scandalous, plant named, 137.
Shark, white, fear inspired by,

113.
Sight in savage and civilized

men, 158-178.
Simson, Mr., on the flute-bird

of Ecuador, 153.
Siskin, black-headed ( Chryso-

mitris icterica), 122, 235.
Snakes, hard to detect, 170;

defective sight of, 177.
Snow, at El Carmen, 108;

whiteness of, and effect on

the mind, 114-118.
Song-s p a r r o w ( Zonotrichia

canicapilla), 25.
Sosa the Scout, anecdote of, 95.
Soul Shapes, treatise on, 159.
South American Missionary

Society, 29.
Spencer, Herbert, on adaptive-

ness of organs, 175.
Swallow, white-rumped (Tachy-

cineta leucorrhoa), morning

song of, 25, 29; purple, 31;

migration of, 32.

Swan, black-necked, 17.
Synallaxis, 9.

JACHYCINETA LEUCORBHOA, see
Swallow, white-rumped.

Tanagers, 150.

Thoreau, instinctive impulses
in, 221; on the robin's song,
223; feeling for nature in,
215

Thorn-bird, habits of, 10.

Thurn, Mr. im, on paucity of
bird music in British Gui-
ana, 148.

Tinamous, eggs of, 46; lan-
guage and habits of, 129-
130; seen on the uplands,
205.

Trapalanda, legend of, 5, 202.

Traru, 169.

Troglodytes furvus, Azara on
song of, 152.

Troupials, number of species,
150.

Trupialis militaris, see Mili-
tary starling.

Tuco-tuco, 37.

Turdus fuscater, see Blackbird,
Argentine.

Tylor, Dr., on animism, 116.

UPLAND GEESE, 51; shooting,

67; depredations of, 81.
Upucerthia dumetoria, 9.

VIGNOLI, DR. DE, on the mythi-
cal faculty, 117.
Vizcacha, bones of, 37.
Vulture, black, 49.

WALLACE, DB. A. R., on bird
music in the tropics, 155;
on human instincts, 223; pe-
culiar theory of, 204.

Waterton, on bare feet, 198.

Whale, The, Melville's romance,
109.

Whiteness, the quality of, 108-

INDEX 249

120 ; abnormal, in animals, Wren, La Plata, Azara on, 153 ;

120. character of song of, 153.

White shark, fear inspired by, Wrens, a highly melodious fam-

113. ily, 153-155.
Willow trees on the Rio Negro,

48. ZENAIUA MACULATA, song of,

Wolseley, Lord, on instinctive 121.

courage, 211. Zonotrichia canicapilla, see

Woodman, 10. Song-sparrow.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES

COLLEGE LIBRARY

This book is due on the last -date stamped below.

r; «MV« Tg,

8 JUL 1980 14 DAY

5 80 REC

Book Slip-35wi-9,'62(D2218s4)4280

College
Library

UCLA-College Library

PR 6015 H86J 1917

L 005 706 534 4

UC SOUTHERN REG ONAL LIBRARY FACILI1

A 001 191 104 7