jilfii'iiiiiiiU!,'

• i',;

' : '

,■':.'{

: ■ :

■

i:l

: :, '■

' I : :

j j ;

:

!SI:

5

!i!!illll!ll!!!!l!ll|flil!lf
PR

6015
U23I3
1923
c.l
ROBARTS

1

'

j

1

j

i

i i

•itj

s

I ;i

1

> III lllllliilfth

Presented to the

LIBRARY of the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

by
The Estate of the late

PROFESSOR A. S. P. WOODHOUSE

Head of the

Department of English

University College

1944-1964

>J

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

First published in 1893

rip ■

AT I. AST, PATAGONIA

IDLE DAYS
IN PATAGONIA

*SS»

«^ar&<arc

BY

W. H. HUDSON

ILLUSTRATED BY
ALFRED HARTLEY AND J. SMIT

1923

J. M. DENT <§f SONS LTD.

LONDON far TORONTO
PARIS: J. M. DENT ET FILS

PR

3

// rights reserved

1009323

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I. At Last, Patagonia !

II. HOW I BECAME AN IDLER .

III. Valley of the Black River

IV. Aspects of the Valley
V. A Dog in Exile

VI. The War with Nature
VII. Life in Patagonia
VIII. Snow, and the Quality of Whiteness
IX. Idle Days ....

X. Bird Music in South America .
XI. Sight in Savages
XII. Concerning Eyes

XIII. The Plains of Patagonia

XIV. The Perfume of an Evening Primrose

Index

PAGE
I

17
29

42

58

73
9i
109
122
142
160
182
203
230

247

IX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

At Last, Patagonia! .

Rhinocrypta Lanceolata

Chanar Trees

Our Captain

Serpent with a Cross

An Indian Burial-place

Swallows Congregating

Black Vulture .

Cow and Pigs

The River by Moonlight

Major and the Flamingo

Upland Geese

Damian gives Himself up

Damian's Wife

Snow at El Carmen .

A Milky Sea

Ctenomys Magellanica

Calodromus Elegans .

Dolichotis Patagonica

Calandria Mocking-bird

Cyphorhinus Cantans

Viewing a Distant Object

Gaucho with Spectacles

Magellanic Eagle-Owl

The Plains of Patagonia

Evening Primrose

Wakening at Dawn

PAGE

Frontispiece
xii

15
16

28

37
40

49
55
57
65
90

103
108
in
120
129

133
141
144

157

173
181
189
222
231
246

XI

J Li

RHINOCRYPTA LANCEOLATA

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

CHAPTER I

AT LAST, PATAGONIA!

THE 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 Rio 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, was 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. 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 tempestuous night.

2 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 fastened, three of the sailors
were standing together talking in low tones. "We
are lost," I heard one say; and another answer,
"Ay, lost for ever!" Just then the mate, roused from
sleep, came running 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 intention to save them-
selves 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 unable to prevent it
except by knocking me senseless, 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 listening. He was the first engineer — a
young Englishman from Newcastle-on-Tyne. Seeing
the men making for the boat, he slipped out of the
engine-room, revolver in hand; and secretly followed

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 3

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 shoot 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 atten-
tion 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 sud-
denly, passed out of it into black and comparatively
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 shore was visible in
the intense darkness, and to me 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 dark-
ness grew less intense; only just ahead of us there
still remained something black and unchangeable —
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

4 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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, and 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,
Patagonia! 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
civilisation! There it lay full in sight before me —
the unmarred desert that wakes strange feelings in
us; the ancient habitation of giants, whose foot-
prints seen on the sea-shore amazed Magellan and
his men, and won for it the name of Patagonia.
There, too, far away in the interior, 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 flavour, 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

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 5

me. Many of the winged wanderers with which I
had been familiar from childhood in La Plata were
visitors, occasional or regular, from this grey wilder-
ness of thorns. In some cases they were passengers,
seen only when they stooped to rest their wings, or
heard far off "wailing their way from cloud to
cloud," impelled by that mysterious thought-baffling
faculty, so unlike all other phenomena in its mani-
festations as to give it among natural things some-
thing of the supernatural. Some of these wanderers,
more especially such as possess only a partial or
limited migration, I hoped to meet again in Pata-
gonia, 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 the wryneck or wheatear, and as old on
the earth, but which had never been named and
never even 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 my-
self 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 grey colouring, 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 sombre-
leafed bushes. It was a desert that had been a desert
always, and for that very reason sweet beyond all

6 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 favourite flower, both in gardens and
growing wild, was the sweet perfumer of the wilder-
ness! 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 a pretty problem, to which I shall devote
a chapter at the end of this book.

Our survey concluded, we set out in the direction
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 Rio 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, wading through a luxuri-
ant 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 morning.

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 7

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-travellers were, however,
delighted at the discovery, and we hastened on,
thinking that we were nearer to the settlement than
we had supposed. But we found the huts unin-
habited, 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 nature.

After walking on some distance we found a narrow
path leading away southward from the ruined vil-
lage, and, believing that it led direct to the Carmen,
the old settlement on the Rio Negro, which is over
twenty miles from the sea, we at once resolved 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 penetrated further into
the interior the dark-leafed bushes I have mentioned

8 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

were more abundant. The dense, stiff, dark-coloured
foliage of these bushes give them a strange appear-
ance on the pale sun-dried plains, as of black rocks
of numberless fantastic forms scattered over the
greyish-vellow ground. No large fowls were seen;
small birds were, however, very abundant, gladden-
ing 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 con-
spicuously on the topmost twig, displaying its ruddy
under plumage; occasionally emitting, 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 numerous, and surpassing
all others in interest, were the omnipresent dendro-
colaptine birds, 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
plumage, 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 restlessly
about among the leaves, occasionally suspending
themselves from the twigs head downwards, after

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 9

the manner of tits. From the distance at intervals
came the piercing cries of the cachalote (Homorus
gutturalis), a much larger bird, sounding like bursts
of hysterical laughter. All these dendrocolaptine
birds have an inordinate 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 labour. 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 com-
fortably be hatched in a pill-box; but frequently,
when the nest has been finished, the builder sets
about demolishing it to get the materials for con-
structing a second nest. One very common species,
Anumbius acuticaudatus, variously called in the
vernacular the thorn-bird, the woodman, and the
firewood-gatherer, sometimes makes three nests in
the course of a year, each composed of a good arm-
ful of sticks. The woodman's nest is, however, 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 centre 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

io IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

long. So compactly made is this enormous nest that
I have 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
palatial 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 armadillo,
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 companions, 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 somewhat from thirst. At
midday we saw before us a low level plain, covered
with long coarse grass of a dull yellowish-green
colour. 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 of
the morning that had so enchanted us at the outset

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! n

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 intolerable ji jo 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 colour. Perched on a stem
above the grass it gave utterance at regular intervals
to a clear, long, plaintive whistle, audible 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. Concluding 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 the mouth of the Rio Negro,
where there was a pilot's house. An hour's walk
brought us to the hill. Climbing to the top, what
was our dismay at beholding not the open blue
Atlantic we had so confidently expected to see, but

12 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 greatest
sufferer that day, as I had insisted on taking my
large cloth poncho, and it proved a great burden to
carry; then my feet had become so swollen and pain-
ful, through wearing heavy riding boots, that I was
at last compelled to pull off these impediments, 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 abandoned, direct-
ing 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 gravellv,
undulating plains, with scattered dark-leafed bushes,
and troops of little singing and trilling birds. Arma-
dillos 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
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 armadillos
he had patiently been carrying all day. They smelt
very tempting when done ; but I feared that the
fat luscious meat would only increase the torturing

AT LAST, PATAGONIA! 13

thirst I suffered, and so while the others picked the
bones I solaced myself with a pipe, sitting in pensive
silence by the fire. Supper done, we stretched our-
selves 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 fortun-
ately 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 advance of us a little
bird broke out into a song marvellously 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 grey and white finch, the Diuca minor,
very common 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 scattered sombre
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.

i4 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 settlement. 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 tracts,
and grew fainter as we proceeded, and finally dis-
appeared 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 (Gurliaca decorticans) began to get common,
growing singly or in small groups. It was about
ten to sixteen feet high, very graceful, with smooth
polished green bole, and pale grey-green mimosa
foliage. It bears a golden fruit as big as a cherry,
with a peculiar delightful flavour, but it was not yet
the season for ripe fruits, and its branches were laden
only with the great nests of the industrious wood-
man. Though it was now the end of December and
past the egg season, in my craving 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 driving
a small troop of horses towards the river. We hailed
him, and he rode up to us, and informed us that we

AT LAST, PATAGONIA!

15

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.

-

CHANAR TREES

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 Rio
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

i6

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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-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.

OUR CAPTAIN

CHAPTER II

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, obscure, and of little interest.
But it was not to be as I had planned it. An acci-
dent, to be described 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 mid-
summer days, with the white-washed walls of my
room for landscape and horizon, and a score or two
of buzzing house-flies, perpetually engaged in their
intricate airy dance, for only company, I was forced
to think on a great variety of subjects, and to occupy
my mind with other problems than that of migration.
These other problems, too, were in many ways like

the flies that shared my apartment, and yet always
b I7

i8 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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
motionless, 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; perhaps to see them
all wheeling in a closer order, describing new fantastic
figures, with swifter motions, their forms turned to
thin black lines, crossing and recrossing in every
direction, as if they had all combined to write a series
of strange characters in the air, all forming a strange
sentence — the secret of secrets! Happily for the
progress of knowledge only a very few of these fas-
cinating 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 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

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 19

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 imagin-
able 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 ap-
peared to suit the genial climate; and this habit and
temper of mind I retained, with occasional 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
has existed since the last century, and is built on the
side of a hill, or bluff, facing the river. On the oppo-
site shore, where there is no cliff nor high bank, and
the low level green valley extends back four or five
miles to the grey 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'

20 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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
abandoned 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 knocking 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 enabled 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
something made of iron or brass — a gun-lock, watch,
or anything complicated. His eyes would shine, he
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 rambled
about the neighbourhood taking stock of the birds.

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 21

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-coloured 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 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,

22 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 putting a can of water by my side,
he left me lying on my saddle-rugs, and, after fasten-
ing the door on the outside to prevent the intrusion
of unwelcome 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 disappointing tidings,
found no boat to recross, and 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 intensely dark.
My wounded leg had become inflamed 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 morning. 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
animals 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

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 23

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 a while 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 coffin in which I had been buried
a hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. Yet
I was no longer alone, if I had only known it, but
had now a messmate and bedfellow who had subtly
crept in to share the warmth of the cloak and of my
person — one with a broad arrow-shaped head, set
with round lidless eyes like polished yellow pebbles,
and a long smooth limbless body, strangely seg-
mented and vaguely written all over with mystic
characters in some dusky tint on an indeterminate
greyish-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 neighbouring willow-tree; and after an interval,
the dreamy, softly rising and falling, throaty warb-
lings 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 temperature and swifter flow
of the blood — the inward resurrection experienced
on each morning of our individual life. Next in

24 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

order the red-billed finches begin to sing — a curious,
gobbling, impetuous 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 grey crested song-sparrows.
Last of all was heard the long, leisurely -uttered
chanting cry of the brown carrion-hawk, as he flew
past, and I knew that the morning was beautiful 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 twilight 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 Craspedocephalns alternatus, 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 attacked 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

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 25

out from me; but I rejoice to think that the secret
deadly creature, after lying all night with me, warm-
ing 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 acquaintance
during his Patagonian rambles about sixty years
ago; and in describing its fierce and hideous 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 recognise 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 mermaids and mermen of
the old mariners; also the sloth with its round
simple face, to which its human shape imparts a
somewhat comical and pathetic look. Many monkeys
seem ugly to us, but we think the lemurs beautiful,
and greatly admire the marmosets, those hairy

26 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

manikins with sprightly, bird-like eyes. And yet it
is true that there is something human in the faces
of this and perhaps of other pit-vipers, and of some
vampire bats, as Darwin remarks; and that the
horror they 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
creatures it simulates such expressions as excite
fear and abhorrence in our own species, or pity so
intense as to be painful — ferocity, stealthy, watchful
malignity, a set look of anguish or despair, or some
dreadful form of insanity. Someone 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 themselves on the coun-
tenance. 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 civilisation,
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 serpent
forms an exception: in spite of the tenderness I
cherish towards the entire ophidian race, the sensa-
tion is not agreeable.

To return. My friend made a fire to boil water,
and after we had had some breakfast, he galloped

HOW I BECAME AN IDLER 27

off once more in a new direction; he had at last re-
membered that on our side of the river there 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 lumbering 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, facing 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 skilful surgeon as well as a divine,
one who had extracted more bullets and mended more
broken bones than most surgeons 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, and gutta-
percha. These painful moments over, with no result

28

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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-coloured chapter, I may here
remark that some of the happiest moments of my
life have been occasioned by those very circumstances
which one would imagine would have made me most
unhappy — by grave accidents, and sickness, which
have disabled and cast me a burden 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.

SERPENT WITH A CROSS

CHAPTER III

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER

STILL a lingerer in the hospitable shade of
the Mission House, my chief pleasure during
the early days of February was in observing the
autumnal muster of the purple swallows — Progne
jurcata — a species which was abundant at this point,
breeding in the cliffs overhanging the river; also,
like so many other swallows in all places, under 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.

The trees of the Mission House proved very

29

30 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

attractive to these birds; the tall Lombardy poplars
were specially favoured, 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 occasion 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 in-
secure 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 powerful 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.

Rain came 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

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER 31

grey 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 morning, before
I had risen, the purple cloud had forsaken 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, speak-
ing 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 vanished 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 colour was
grey, her mood pensive as winter deepened, and
there was nothing in the cup to inflame 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 grey desolate solitude and
its effects on me must be reserved for a later chapter,

32 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 during
the autumn, winter, and spring months I resided 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 River, by the aborigines, unless the epithet
referred only to its swiftness and dangerous charac-
ter; for it is not black at all in appearance, like its
Amazonian namesake. The water, which flows from
the Andes across a continent of stone and gravel, is
wonderfully pure, in colour 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

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER 33

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 mani-
festation 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 summer
had an excessively dry and barren appearance. 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 : 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 mould;
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.

34 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

and, as has happened in most temperate regions of
the globe colonised by Europeans, the sweet, quick-
growing, short-lived grasses and clovers of the Old
World sprang up and occupied the soil. Here, how-
ever, owing to its poverty, the excessive dryness of
the climate, and the violence of the winds that
prevail in summer, 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 stripping 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. 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 arrow-heads. The anthropologist

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER 35

could not have wished for a more favourable 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
curious 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, armadillo,
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 (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 colonisation of the country by

36 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 labour in different villages; of the individuality
of the worker, and a distinct artistic or aesthetic
taste. I was led to this conclusion bv the discovery
of a village site where no large round stones, knives
and scrapers were found, and no 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 beautiful stone — crystal, agate, and green,
yellow, and horn-coloured flint. It was impossible
to take half-a-dozen of these gems of colour 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

i+ I

a^

^

il/l

i_iiUi_

I

"If

AN INDIAN BURIAL-PLACE

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER 39

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 Pata-
gonia; but they are without doubt so changed, and
have lost so much, that their progenitors 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 Mississippi 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 beyond
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 dormant in them, and that
they were slowly progressing 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 occasion,

40

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

as I propose to show in a later chapter, the wished
vision of the past came unsought and unexpectedly
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

k

'MM

frWH,

*:

■

> V

■4&

vps^

V

SWALLOWS CONGREGATING

over, only without the supernaturalism 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 personality, our environment,
our outlook on nature.

VALLEY OF THE BLACK RIVER 41

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 investigation, causing
"all things to droop and languish." In such a mood
I would make my way to one of the half-a-dozen
ancient burial-places existing in the neighbourhood
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
skeletons. 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 walking not
to touch an exposed skull with my foot, although
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 mournful
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 grotesque, nor merely
idle, nor quite fanciful, like Buffon'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 colour; its margins
grey, growing fainter and bluer outwardly, and finally
fading into nothing ; between the grey edges the
band would be green; and along this green middle
band, not always keeping to the centre, 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

42

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 43

from some cis- or trans-Andean country they had
originally brought hither traditions, and some super-
natural system that took its form and colour from
a different nature, these had been modified, if not
wholly dissolved and washed away in that swift
eternal green current, by the side of which they
continued 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
grey 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 grey 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 heavenly 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 persistent, 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 anyone know, whether the
former dwellers in the valley left any descendants,

44 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

any survivors of that age that left some traces
of a brightening intellect on its stone work. Pro-
bably not; the few Indians now inhabiting the
valley are most probably modern colonists of another
family or nation; yet it did not surprise me to hear
that some of these half -tame, half -christianised
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 cognisant 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 reverence, as if I had made a jest
of something sacred. Nor to this day can I think of
the Patagonian 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, bring-
ing 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 intelligent-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

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 45

I lived. My home, I said, was in the Buenos Ayrean
pampas, far north of Patagonia.

"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 direc-
tion— 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 thorny, waterless uplands, it
was, perhaps, inconceivable 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 something 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-
grand-daughter 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

46 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 flavours and little adventures that count for so
much with the very young. In birds' eggs, the
greatest prizes are those of the partridge-like tina-
mous, 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 darzvini, whose eggs vary
in tint from wine-purple to a reddish-purple or liver
colour. In summer and autumn fruits and sweet
gums are not scarce. One grey-leafed herbaceous
shrub is much sought after for its sap, that oozes
from the stem and hardens in small globes and lumps
that look and taste like white sugar. There is a small
disc-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-grey
bushes. It bears a splendid crimson flower, and a
crimson fruit that is insipid and not considered
worth eating; but being of so beautiful a colour, to
see it is sufficient pleasure. The plant is not very
common, 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 chafiar 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 flavour is peculiar and

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 47

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 spinosa),
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 profusion that
the broad tops of the bushes become masses of
deep colour in autumn. There are two varieties,
one crimson, the other purple - black, like sloes
and blackberries. They have a strong but not un-
pleasant flavour, and the children are so fond of them
that, like the babes in the wood, their little 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 greys, greens, and browns of nature on
either side of it. It has the powerful effect of bright-
ness, 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 conditions 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
colour in the vegetation to delight the eyes. The
commonest of the grey-foliaged plants that grow on
the high grounds along the borders of the valley is
the chafiar (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 colour resembling the flower

48 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

of the broom. At this season the uplands along the
valley have a strangely gay appearance. Again,
there is yellow in the autumn — the deeper yellow
of xanthophyll — when the leaves of the red willows
growing on the banks of the river change their colour
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. But its existence is now doomed
as a large tree of a century's majestic growth, forming
a suitable perch and look-out for the harpy and grey
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 (Felts 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

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY

49

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 VULTURE

black vultures (C nth arte s atratus) were perched, wait-
ing all the 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-
relling with his fellows over a carcase: but when

D

50 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

perched aloft, his small naked rugous head and neck
and horny curved beak seen well denned 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 grey Patagonia looked more soberly and sadly
grey than on this afternoon. The soil, except in
places where the winter grass had spread over it,
had taken a darker brown colour from the rain it
had imbibed, and the bosky uplands a deeper grey
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 loveliness. For nearly an hour we rode
with this vision of glory always before us; grove
after grove of leafless black-barked willow-trees on
our right hand, and grey 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 droning
cries; and the arch of watery fire still lived, now
fading as the flying wrack grew thinner and thinner,

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 51

then, just when it seemed about to vanish, brighten-
ing once more to a new and more wonderful splendour,
its arch ever widening to greater proportions as the
sun sunk lower in the sky.

I do not suppose that the colours were really more
vivid than in numberless other rainbows I have
seen; it was, I think, the universal greyness of earth
and heaven in that grey winter season, in a region
where colour 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 sombre ground.
This was taught to us by the green and violet arch
on the slaty-grey vapour. But Nature is too wise

To blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure.

The day of supernatural splendour and glory
comes only after many days that are only natural,
and of a neutral colour. It is watched and waited
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
analyse. 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 unex-
pectedly looked back to us from heaven, transfigured.
It strikes me as strange that, so far as we know, the
Incas were the only worshippers of the rainbow.

52 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 except
for a few masses of cloud low down in the west;
and these, some time after the sun had disappeared,
assumed more vivid and glowing colours, 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 intense 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 quivered 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-coloured. This appearance lasted for
five or six minutes, then the crimson colour 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 colour 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

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY 53

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 current 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 in-
finitude; but on the south side, outside the valley, a
sheer stupendous precipice 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
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 disappeared 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

54 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 vultures and grey
eagles over the carcases 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 long period without
diminishing in number, in spite of the occasional
great tides that flood the whole island, and of multi-
tudes 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 neighbouring 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 pur-
poses. 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 round her; for
they were all apparently ambitious to rest with
their heads pillowed on her, so that she was almost
concealed under them. Presently one of the drove,
more wakeful than his fellows, became aware of his
presence and gave the alarm, whereupon they started

tfl

o

Q
Z

<!

O

o

— \.

V,

ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY

57

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

THE RIVER BY MOONLIGHT

round her like a bodyguard. This continued 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," 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 some-
times 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

4T the English estate up the river, where 1
/-\ 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 colour, but oftenest red or black;
also differing much in size, but in a majority of cases
about as big as a Scotch collie. 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 accommodating himself
to the new circumstances was a Scotch collie — 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 considerable trouble
you might be able to add a few ornamental subjects,

58

A DOG IN EXILE 59

such as giving his paw, and keeping guard over a
coat or stick left in his charge. He is a generalised
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
collie 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
instincts. 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 inex-
haustible energy became their leader and superior,
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 collie 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 collie,
take their share in the ordinary work of the estab-
lishment, they were absolutely useless, and certainly
not ornamental. When I first noticed them they
were pitiable objects, thin as skeletons, so lame that
they could scarcely walk, and wounded and scratched
all over with thorns. 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

60 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

or four days they remained inactive, sleeping the
whole time, except when they limped to the kitchen
to be fed. But day by day they improved in con-
dition; their scratches healed, their ribbed sides
grew smooth and sleek, and they recovered from
their lameness; but scarcely had they got well be-
fore 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 recover 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 heterogeneous
canine community was a retriever, one of the hand-
somest 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 name — would have lent himself well to sculpture.
He was old, but not too fat, nor inactive; some-
times he would go out with the other dogs, but
apparently he could not keep up 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

A DOG IN EXILE 61

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 impatient craving
for notice. A fussy, demonstrative 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, following
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 interested
in everything going on about him; but by experi-
menting I found that he could scarcely see 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 acquaintance would have
made the discovery of his defective sight.

Of course, after this, I could have nothing mor

62 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

to do with the retriever, further than patting him
on the head and speaking a kind word to him when-
ever he chanced to be in my way. But this was
not enough for old Major. He was a sporting dog,
full of energy, and with undiminished faith in his
own powers, in spite of his years, and when a sports-
man 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 neighbourhood; 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 intervened 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 greatest
kindness by everyone on the place, and although
all the other dogs about the house looked up to him
with that instinctive respect they always accord to
the oldest, or strongest, or most domineering mem-
ber, 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 energy. This was when we

A DOG IN EXILE 63

went down to the river to bathe in the afternoon,
and when we would amuse ourselves, some of us,
by throwing enormous 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 graduated
with honours at the Royal School of Mines, con-
sequently 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 gratitude 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 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 flamingos 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

64 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 flamin-
gos are not common in that district, but because I
had noticed that one of the birds before me was the
largest and loveliest flamingo 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; nevertheless, 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 under 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 he struggled
hopelessly for a little while, and then floundered
back to me. There was, however, nothing 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 violent struggle he suc-
ceeded in getting through them, and, finding himself
in deep water, struck straight out, and then began

A DOG IN EXILE

65

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

fe*

MAJOR AND THE FLAMINGO

to the rushes with it, and I heard him crashing and
floundering through, snorting and coughing as if
half-suffocated, 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

66 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 beautiful crimson,
rose-coloured, and faintly-blushing white plumage!
Had he not himself been so plastered 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 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 enjoying
my after-dinner coffee, and a pipe of the strongest
cavendish, I related the day's adventures, and then
for the first time heard from my host something of
Major's antecedents and remarkable 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 igno-
minious death; he escaped to become a pioneer of
civilisation 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

A DOG IN EXILE 67

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 division of labour, in which so mean a part was
assigned 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 some-
where 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 remembered
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 game-
keeper gave it to him, and he in turn gave it to his

68 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

friend, and in this way Major 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 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 exploits, com-
pared with which the greatest deeds of all retrievers
in other lands would sink into insignificance.

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 de-
licious early Patagonian breakfasts.

Now the geese, although abundant at that season,
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

A DOG IN EXILE 69

mud-bank in one of the lagoons, and immediately
began to manoeuvre to get within shooting distance
without disturbing them. Fortunately they were
in a great state of excitement, keeping up a loud
incessant clamour, as if something very important
to the upland geese was being discussed, and in the
general agitation they neglected their safety. More
geese in small flocks were continually arriving from
various directions, increasing the noise and excite-
ment; 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 floundering 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
began worrying them, growling all the time with a
playful affectation of anger, and pulling out mouth-
fuls 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

70 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

well enough, but was not disposed to obey, that he
found it very amusing playing with the geese and
intended to enjoy himself to his heart's content.

"Major! Major!" I cried, "you base ungrateful
dog! Is this the way you repay me for all my kind-
ness, 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 worrying 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. Fortunately he had a long distance to swim,
and before 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-coloured geese that had cost me so much
labour to kill. Yes, I thought, it will be better to dis-
semble and be diplomatic and receive him graciously,
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 me without

A DOG IN EXILE 71

shaking himself, evidently beginning to experience
some qualms of conscience.

"Major," said I, addressing him in a mild gentle
voice, and patting his wet black head, "you have
treated me very badly, but I am not going to punish
you — I am 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 reaching 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 distance 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
that he had already hopelessly offended me, and so

72 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

concluded to save himself the labour 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 un-
fortunate beggar in the street; and it was a satis-
faction 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 ineradicable
anthropomorphism to carry me so far in recalling
and describing our joint adventures. But such a
fault is almost excusable in this instance, 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 circumstances and handi-
capped by such an infirmity, could have retrieved
that splendid flamingo; but with this excellence
there was the innate capacity 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 intervals.
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
someone 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 uncon-
scious memory on the intellect, like the action of
the person who has resided all his life in a hovel, and
who, on entering a cathedral door or passing under
a lofty archway, unwittingly stoops to avoid bump-
ing his forehead against an imaginary lintel. I was
conscious on quitting the room, where I had cast
aside the unread newspaper, that the old interest
in the affairs of the world at large had in a great
measure forsaken me; yet the thought did not seem

73

74 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 arti-
ficial feeling, a necessary accompaniment of the
conditions we live in, perhaps, 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 stimulants. 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 lesson Nature
taught me in that lonely country was not wholly
wasted, and while I was in that condition of mind
I found it very agreeable.* I was delighted to discover
that the stimulus derived from many daily telegrams
and much discussion of remote probabilities were not
necessary to keep my mind from lethargy. Things

THE WAR WITH NATURE 75

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 dom-
estic 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 Russia, the attitude of the Sublime Porte, and
the meeting or breaking up of parliaments. When
the Eastern Question had lost its ancient fascination
for me I found a world large enough for my sym-
pathies 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 hun-
dreds of desert leagues from all communion with
fellow-christians, surrounded by a great wilderness,
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.

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,

76 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

to introduce domestic cattle, and to slay a larger
number of wild animals than he requires for food —
and civilised man must do all that to create the con-
ditions he imagines necessary to his existence — from
that moment does he place himself in antagonism
with Nature, and has thereafter to suffer countless
persecutions at her hands. After a century of resi-
dence in the valley the colonist has established his
position so that he cannot 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 flourishing 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 maintains
the conflict, enlisting the elements, with bird, beast,
and insect, against the hated white disturber, whose
"""»y of life is not in harmony with her way.

There are the animal foes. Pumas infest the
ttlement. At all seasons a few of these sly but
withal audacious robbers haunt the riverside; but
in winter a great many lean and hungry individuals
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 over-

THE WAR WITH NATURE 77

hanging the valley. I was told that not less than a
hundred pumas were killed annually by the shepherds
and herdsmen. The depredations of the locusts are
on a much larger scale. In summer I frequently
rode over miles of ground where they literall ar-
peted 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 appeared 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 succeeded in
wasting his corn.

On either side of the long straggling s - ' • • • !
spreads the uninhabited desert — uninhab.. 1 .
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 m) . * •
pigeons, ducks, and geese were the greatest foe
the farmer. When the sowing season commenced

78 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

the pigeons {Columha 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, half 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 (Chloephaga 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 flutter-
ing 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 labours were quite profitless;
fresh armies of geese on their way north were con-
tinually pouring in, making a vast camping ground
of the valley, till scarcely a blade of grass remained
for the perishing cattle.

Viewed from a distance, in comfortable homes,
this contest of man with the numberless destructive
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

THE WAR WITH NATURE 79

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 regard to many things
as we progress in life, and experience widens, but
in most cases the old expressions 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 colour. We
learn a kind of emasculated language in the nursery,
from schoolmasters, and books written indoors, and
it has to serve us. It proves false, but its falsity is
perhaps never clearly recognised; 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 sympathy and pity
from his listeners; but he knows 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
savourless. 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-pro-
tected, than degeneration begins. But about the

80 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

condition of the inferior animals, with regard to the
comparative dulness 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, although
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, chapters, and even books —
might be written on this subject, but to write them
is happily unnecessary, since everyone 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 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
infuriated 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

THE WAR WITH NATURE 81

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 seeing
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 warning: "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 sunshine,
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-tops, for, to begin
with, he will not believe nor listen to it. His mind
is fixed on the three glorious prizes that lure him
away — Adventure, Distinction, 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 thou-
sand miles away through his mental telescope, sees
them apparently hanging on very much lower
branches, and imagines that to pluck them he has
only to transport himself beyond the ocean. To
drop this metaphor, adventure in that distant place
will be as common as the air he breathes, giving him
much invigorating pleasure by the way, while he
advances to possess himself of other more satisfying
things. With the nimble brains, brave spirit, and

82 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

willing hands characteristic of the inhabitants of
the British Islands, he will assuredly be able to
achieve distinction — that pretty bit of ribbon which
most men are willing enough to wear.

This, however, is only a matter of secondary
importance; 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 supply
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 perhaps flow
in upon him through business channels; in most
cases it will be thought more agreeable to pick it
up in its native state during his walks abroad in
the forest. The simple-minded aborigines, always
ready to humour an eccentric taste, will assist him
in collecting it; and, finally, for a small considera-
tion in the form of coloured 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 colours bright as these; let him shade the picture
until it corresponds in tone with his individual
creation — a dream and a delusion it will nevertheless
remain. Not in these things which will never be
his, nor in still cherishing 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

THE WAR WITH NATURE 83

temperament, arrived in some far-off city where all
men are free and equal, and the starched conven-
tionalities of the Old World are unknown, it is per-
haps 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," instantly 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 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. Meanwhile,
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

84 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

vanished dreams, which, like water-lilies, blossom
only on stagnant pools. Here are none of the in-
numerable appliances to secure comfort he has been
used to from infancy, regarding them almost as
spontaneous 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 plough 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
own conditions, has only a pair of soft weak hands.
To one fresh from the softness and smoothness of
civilisation, unaccustomed to manual labour, 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 splendours 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

THE WAR WITH NATURE 85

with a healthy and enduring interest in life. To
this feeling is added the charm of novelty caused
by that endless procession of surprises which Nature
prepares for the pioneer — an experience unknown to
the rural life of countries that have long been under
cultivation. The greatest drawbacks and difficulties
encountered have this charm strongest in them, and
are robbed by it of half their power to discourage
the mind.

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 nighty, capricious thing, that will not
be wholly ruled by you, a beautiful wayward Undine,

86 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

delighting you with her originality, 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 re-
quired 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
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 imagine,
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 arrays 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 horrible gloom to the heavens. And darkness
not being terrifying enough, she kindles up the
mighty chaos she has created into a blaze of in-
tolerable light, while the solid world is shaken to
its foundations with her wrathful thunders. When
destruction 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 furious
passion has spent itself, and there is no trace left of

THE WAR WITH NATURE 87

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 subdue the wild thing at last,
but not yet; many years will she struggle to retain
her ancient sweet supremacy; 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 terrors — 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 per-
fume 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 scattered 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

88 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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, secretlv she
goes out at dawn of day and blows her trumpet 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 creeping things and in
clouds that darken the air. Mice and crickets swarm
in the fields; a thousand insolent birds pull his
scarecrows to pieces, and carry off the straw stuffing
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 deliverance comes; famine falls on the
mighty host of his enemies; they devour each other
and perish utterly. 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 fertilise 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 humble
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 fertility. Everywhere, as

THE WAR WITH NATURE 89

if by a miracle, is spread the mantle of rich, green,
noisome leaves, and the corn is smothered in beauti-
ful flowers that yield only bitter seed and poison
fruit. He may cut them 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
innumerable children to come and fall on and destroy
him utterly.

This is no mere fancy portrait, for Nature herself
sat for it in the desert, and it is painted in true
colours.. 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 realised, 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 con-
fusion 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

90

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

he who dies of apoplexy in a counting-house or
dining-room; or who, finding that end which seemed
so infinitely beautiful 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.

,,*\*"'

UPLAND GEESE

CHAPTER VII

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
isolated little colony has so often been involved
during its century of existence. One episode from
its eventful history I wish to relate, for in this in-
stance the Patagonians had, for once, to oppose a
foreign and civilised 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 documents. 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 plundering
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 trouble-
some neighbour, until 1828, when they finally aban-
doned the contest. During this war the Imperialists
conceived the idea of capturing the Patagonian

91

92 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 in-
significant conquest, and in due time reached the
Rio Negro. One of the ships came to grief on the
bar, which is very difficult; and there it eventually
became a total wreck. The other two succeeded in
getting safely into the river. The troops, to the num-
ber of five hundred 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 continue its march
near the river, owing to the steep hills intersected
by valleys and ravines and covered 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 de-
fend themselves. Women and children were brought
into the fort; guns were loaded and placed in posi-
tion; then the commander had a happy inspira-
tion, and all the strong women were made to

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 93

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-sickness
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 concert 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 rising ground, his seventy men were hastily
dispatched to collect and bring in all the horses
pasturing in the valley. When the invaders had been
about three or four hours on their spiritless return
march, the thunder of innumerable hoofs was heard
behind them, and looking back, they beheld a great
army, as they imagined in their terror, charging
down upon them. These were their seventy foes
spread in an immense half-moon, in the hollow of

94 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

which over a thousand horses were being driven along
at frantic speed. The Brazilians 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 invaders. 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 discretion — five hundred disciplined soldiers of the
Empire to seventy poor Patagonians, mostly farmers,
tradesmen, and artisans. The honour of the Empire
was very little to those famishing wretches crying out
with frothing mouths for water instead of quarter.
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 Parrots' 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 smoth-
ered, while others, 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

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 95

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 material being rather expensive on
the Rio 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, 1 have got out of my boat and
stood upon them experiencing a feeling of great
satisfaction. 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
Parrots' Cliff, one of our neighbours I was very
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 celebrated
horse -thief. His horse - stealing propensities were
ineradicable, and had to be winked at on account

96 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 sagacity 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 Argentine 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 south-western
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 bv his enemies — was roused, and
at his instigation Sosa was removed by means of a
cup of poison. The son, though in all other respects
a degenerate being, inherited his father's wonderful
senses. One instance of his keen-sightedness 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 desert — he amused himself
by hunting ostriches along the Rio Colorado. On the
1 2th of March the hunters were camping beside a

LIFE IN PATAGONIA

97

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
moments. "There is not a breath of wind blowing,"
he exclaimed, " yet the leaves of the trees are trem-
bling. What can this portend ? ': 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 dis-
turbed in his mind. He remarked 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 destroyed
the distant city of Mendoza, crushing 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 Rosario and Buenos Ayres clocks stopped,
and a slight shock was also experienced in the Carmen
on the Rio 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 1 frequently importuned

98 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

him to tell some of his early experiences in the
settlement. But somehow he invariably drifted into
amorous and gambling reminiscences, interesting 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 storv.

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 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 un-
saddling 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

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 99

to lose, and away they rushed to the river, throwing
off their clothes as they ran. In a few moments 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 them-
selves 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 be-
ginning 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
once more : here one of them, a youth named Damian,
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 selfishness, 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 burden
themselves with a male captive when they happen

ioo IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 compassion on him. He
began, in fact, to appeal to their mercy from the
moment he abandoned his companions. "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."

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
arrive, 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 valley; 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

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 101

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 instead
of one of his usual love intrigues or gambling ad-
ventures was because that very day he had seen
Damian once more, just returned to the settlement
where he had so long been forgotten by everyone.
Thirty years of exposure to the sun 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 relations 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 them-
selves 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 captive
he invented many other ingenious lies, saying 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

102 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

he had towards his own race, he assured 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 piteous 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, inhabiting
a district called Las Manzanas — that is, the Apple
Country — situated at the sources of the Rio 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 implements
of husbandry, grain, and seeds of European fruits.
The missionaries soon met their death, and all that
remained of their labours among the heathen were
a few apple-trees they had planted. These trees
found a soil and climate so favourable, that they
soon began to propagate spontaneously, becoming
exceedingly abundant. Certain it is that now, 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.

0.

w

c/)

>

<

Q

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 105

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, wThen 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 own people
again. Escape was impossible: to have revealed
his true feelings would have exposed 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-huntsmen; 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 sus-
pended from the branches of a great tree, so that
all the blood might be caught, for this is the chief
delicacy 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

106 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

gathered round to the feast, poor Damian would be
with them to drink his share of the abhorred liquid,
hot from the heart of the still living brute. In autumn,
when the apples were fermented 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 danger-
ous in the hands of drunken men, to carry them away
into the forest, where they would conceal themselves
with the children. Then for days the warriors would
give themselves up to the joys of intoxication; 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 trucu-
lent in their cups, and loving above all things to have
a Koko-huincbe, 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 alwavs indus-
trious and the patient, willing, affectionate slave of
her lord — and with all his young barbarians at play

LIFE IN PATAGONIA 107

on the grass before his hut, he would sit in the wan-
ing 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 becoming
men, the gnawing discontent at his breast made
him resolve to leave the tribe and the life he secretly
hated. He joined a hunting-party going towards the
Atlantic coast, and after travelling 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 companion-
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

108 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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
realising in a dull vague kind of way that it might
never more be with him as it had been in the van-
ished 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 mvsterious haze of the desert!
Poor Damian, and poor wife!

DAMIAN S WIFE

CHAPTER VIII

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 transfigured
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 gratified, can appreciate my
sensations on first beholding snow.

My visit to Patagonia so far had been rich in ex-
periences. One of the first, just before touching its
shores, but after the ship had struck on the hidden
rocks, was the effect of whiteness as seen in a tumul-
tuous milky sea; and now, after several months, there

IOQ

no IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 besides, 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 feel-
ing which so many, perhaps a majority of persons,
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 White Whale, there is a long dissertation, perhaps
the finest thing in the book, on whiteness in nature,
and its effect on the mind. It is an interesting and
somewhat obscure subject; and, as Melville is the
only writer I know who has dealt with it, and some-
thing 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 natural
objects whiteness enhances beauty, as if it imparted
some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japon-
icas, pearls; that the quality of whiteness is em-
blematic of whatever we regard as high and most
worthy of reverence; that it has for us innumerable
beautiful and kindly associations. "Yet," he goes
on to say, "for all these accumulated associations
with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime,

THE QUALITY OF WHITENESS in

there lurks an illusive something in the innermost
idea of this hue which strikes more of panic to the
soul than the redness 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 tran-
sient in its effect, that only when we are told of it
do we look for and recognise its existence in us.

SNOW AT EL CARMEN

And this only with regard to certain things, a dis-
tinction which Melville failed to see, this being his
first mistake in his attempt to "solve the incantation
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

ii2 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 pro-
fusion as to whiten whole fields, as with snow, and
their whiteness yet be no more to the fancy than the
yellows, 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 greenness
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 some-
thing ':' which Melville found in the innermost 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 un-
pleasant 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 con-
cludes that it is their whiteness that makes them

THE QUALITY OF WHITENESS 113

so much more terrible to us than other savage
rapacious creatures that are dangerous to man. He
speaks of the muffled rolling of a milky sea; the rust-
lings of the festooned frost of mountains; the deso-
late shiftings 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 otherwise,
according to the nature and magnitude of the sub-
ject, 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 persecuting,
a companion who, owing to failing strength or some
physical defect, is not able to do his share of the
work. Savages and semi-barbarous 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 civilised and humane, the sight of sickness
is probably always, in some measure, repulsive and
shocking, especially in cases in which the skin loses

H

ii4 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

its natural colour, such as anaemia, consumption,
chlorosis, and jaundice. This natural and universal
cause of dislike of the albino would be strengthened
among pure savages by the superstitious element
— the belief that the abnormal paleness of the in-
dividual was supernatural, that want of colour
s'gnified absence of soul.

As to the white shark of the tropics, the simplest
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 apprehensively, with the result that
there would be a predisposition to regard it with
a fear exceeding that inspired by other creatures
equally or even more dangerous to human life, but
inconspicuously coloured, hence not so vividly seen,
and creating no such distinct and persistent mental
image. Let us consider what would be the effect
of the appearance of a warrior, habited in snowy
white, or shining gold, or vivid scarlet, or flame-
colour, among a host of contending men, fighting
in the old fashion with sword and spear and battle-
axe, all clothed and armoured in dull neutral or
sombre colours. Wherever he appeared every eye
would be attracted to him; his movements and
actions would be followed with intense interest by
all, and bv his antagonists with keen apprehension;
every time he parried a blow aimed at his life he

THE QUALITY OF WHITENESS 115

would appear invulnerable to the lookers-on, and
whenever an enemy went down before him it would
seem that a supernatural energy nerved his arm,
that the gods were righting 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 another;
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 rabbits 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 moun-
tains, 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 forgotten, or else set down as an effect
of mere novelty. 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 similar
to that of the horse with regard to the smell of some

1 1 6 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

animal which has the effect of violently agitating
it. He calls it an inherited experience. "Nor, in
some things," he says, "does the common 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 desolations, and stupendous calamities
overwhelming the race of man.

It is a sublime conception, adequately expressed;
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 obliterated 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 spectralness over the
fancy, and instinctive horror, which the surviving
remnant transmitted by inheritance 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; never-
theless, I reject Melville's explanation in favour 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 all exceptional
phenomena. The mysterious feelings produced in
us by the sight of a snow-whitened earth are not

THE QUALITY OF WHITENESS 117

singular, but are similar in character to the feelings
caused by many other phenomena, and they may be
experienced, although 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 Tylor gives it in his Primitive
Culture: in that work it signifies a theory of life,
a philosophy of primitive man, which has been
supplanted among civilised people by a more ad-
vanced philosophy. Animism here means not a
doctrine of souls that survive the bodies and objects
they inhabit, but the mind's projection of itself into
nature, its attribution of its own sentient 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 effectu-
ally killed by ratiocination, or that it only survives
for a period in our children, 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 enchanted.

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 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

1 1 8 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

to say, but that in moments of excitement, when
we revert to primitive conditions 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 functions,
found ourselves in circumstances which produced
the momentary personification of natural objects.
The sight of some extraordinary phenomenon pro-
duces a vague sense of someone acting with a given
purpose." Not assuredly of "someone" outside of
and above the natural phenomenon, 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 we are animistic to this
extent only at rare moments, and in exceptional
circumstances, and during certain aspects of nature
that recur only at long intervals. And 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 beneficent activity,
and all that this means to the human family — the
failure of food and consequent want, and the suffer-

THE QUALITY OF WHITENESS 119

ing and danger from intense cold. This traditional
knowledge of an inclement period in nature only
serves to intensify the animism that finds a given
purpose in all natural phenomena, 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 recogni-
tion, any bond; and if we were to fall down and
perish by the wayside, there would be no compassion:
it is sitting 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 feeling
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 relates an anecdote
of an old sailor who swooned 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 wrafh — the sight of its tremendous passion
and deadly purpose proved too appalling.

120

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 navi-
gates is to his mind alive and intelligent, how much
more the ocean, which, even to landsmen on each
return to it after an interval, seems no mere expanse
of water, but a living conscious thing. It was only my

A MILKY SEA

strangeness to the sea which prevented the sight of
its whiteness from affecting me profoundly: animism
in me is strongest with regard to terrestrial pheno-
mena, 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

THE QUALITY OF WHITENESS 121

other savage beasts that are dangerous to man, is
due to its association with the death-like repellent
whiteness and desolation of polar scenery ?

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
colour of the object are scarcely enough to account
for the intensity of the interest excited. Among
savages the distinguishing whiteness is sometimes re-
garded as supernatural: and this fact inclines me to
believe that, just as any extraordinary phenomenon
produces a vague idea of someone acting with a
given purpose, so in the case of the white animal,
its whiteness has not come by accident 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

BEFORE the snow, which has given rise to so
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-grey, which is Nature's livery at all
times in this part of Patagonia; while from the drip-
ping 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 incessant; and the
choir is then led by that incomparable 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, resembling that of the wocd-
pigeon of Europe, and the softer, more sigh-like
lamentations of the Zenaida maculata, so replete with
wild pathos, are heard from the leafless willows

122

IDLE DAYS 123

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 grey 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 shelter-
ing himself from the cold blast continues till after
dark warbling out snatches of song from his inex-
haustible repertory; his own music being apparently
necessary as food and air to his existence.

Warm lovely days succeeded the snowfall. Rising
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 plea-
sant to behold, making the grey solitudes smile as if
conscious of the heavenlv 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 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

i24 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 atmo-
sphere at all times is so dry and pure as to make
pulmonary complaints unknown. A wealthy trades-
man 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 enemv found him there;
his asthma became worse and worse, and at last, on
his doctor's recommendation, 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
business 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, since
he found it impossible ever to accommodate himself
to such a rude existence; that he was essentially a
child of civilisation, a man of the pavement, whose
pleasure was in society, in newspapers, the play, and
in the cafe where one meets one's friends of an even-
ing and has a pleasant game of dominoes. As these

IDLE DAYS 125

things which he valued were merely dust and ashes
to me, I did not sympathise deeply with his discon-
tent, nor consider that it mattered much which por-
tion 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 row-
ing 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 resinous gum, known here by its
Indian name maken. 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

126 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 flavour
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 gum
is not merely an idle habit, and the least that can
be said in its favour 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 ex-
traneous matter, and gives them such a pearly lustre
as I have never seen outside of this region.

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 stubborn rubber case.
Nothing will serve to remove it when it comes to
this pass but raw suet, vigorously chewed for half
an hour, with occasional sips of cold water to harden
the delightful mixture and induce it to come away.

IDLE DAYS 127

The culmination 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 stiffness artificially imparted to
it, and suddenly, without rhyme or reason, retrans-
forms 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 discouraging to the novice. Maken-
chewing is a habit common to everybody through-
out 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
hours through the bushes to listen to the birds,
learning their language and making myself familiar
with their habits. How coy are some species whose
instincts ever impel them to concealment! 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

128 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 creatures that still succeed in eluding
his sight.

Now the little cock {Rhinocrypta 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 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
vards 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 possibly
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

IDLE DAYS

i 29

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 contrary effect on the

CTENOMYS MAGELLANICA

oculto's orbs, and made them large, although, not
so large as in some cave-rodents. On tiptoe, scarcely
breathing, I approach 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

130 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 ap-
proached 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 curiosity, and days, even
weeks, may now elapse before I come so near seeing
the Ctenomys magellanica again.

It is near sunset, and, hark! as I ramble on I hear
in the low scrub before me the crested tinamous
(Calodromns 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 repeats his note half a dozen
times, then the contagion 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 furtive
eyes to watch my movements, yet concealed from
me by that wonderful adaptive resemblance in the

IDLE DAYS 131

colour of their plumage to the sere grass and foliage
around them, and by that correlated instinct which
bids them sit still in their places. I find many evi-
dences of their presence — prettily-mottled feathers
dropped when they preened their wings, also a dozen
or twenty neat circular hollows scooped in the sand
in which they recently dusted themselves. There
are also little chains of footprints running from one
hollow to the other; for these pulverising 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 nejas, find
accommodation somewhere.

I leave the favoured 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, an emotion 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 useless
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.

132 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Night also brings supper, welcome to the hungry
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 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, having
only been able to discover one book in the house, a
Spanish Libro de Mis a, 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 beautiful, 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 careless, and lectured him on the immorality of
cheating 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

IDLE DAYS

133

long practice; so it happened that every night I
was compelled to draw on my memory or invention
for stories to pay my losses.

Only at night one feels the winter here, but in
September one knows that it has gone, though
summer birds have not yet returned, nor the forest
of dwarf mimosas burst into brilliant yellow bloom.

CALODROMUS ELEGANS

Through all seasons the general aspect of nature remains
the same, owing to the grey undeciduous foliage of
the tree and shrub vegetation 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

134 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 summit
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 martins; 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 dis-
porting themselves in the water. I take a stone the
bigness of my hand, and, poising it over the perilous
rim, 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 marvellous
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

IDLE DAYS 135

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 (GEcodoma) 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 actions, simu-
lates man's intellect very closely, and not in the
unpleasant manner of species having warrior castes
and slaves. The leaf-cutter is exclusively agricultural
in its habits, and constructs 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 withered
leaves are carried out to make room for a layer of
fresh ones. Thus the QLcodoma literally grows its own
food, and in this respect appears to have reached a
stage beyond the most highly developed ant com-
munities hitherto described. Another interesting
fact is that, although the leaf-cutters have a peaceful
disposition, never showing resentment except when

136 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

gratuitously interfered with, they are just as cour-
ageous as any purely predatory species, only their
angry emotions and warlike qualities always appear
to be dominated by reason and the public good.
Occasionally a community of leaf-cutters goes to war
with a neighbouring colony of ants of some other
species; in this, as in everything else, they seem to
act with a definite purpose and great deliberation.
Wars are infrequent, but in all those I have wit-
nessed— and I have known this species from child-
hood— 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 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 acquaint-
ance of nature in a London square, will smile at my
wonderful ant story. Well, 1 have smiled too, and
cried a little, perhaps, when, witnessing one of these
"decisive battles of the world," I have thought that
the stable civilisation of the (Ecodoma ants will
probably continue to nourish 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 labours of a
colony of leaf-cutters — a thousand years ago, let us

IDLE DAYS 137

say, before the canker had entered into his system
to make it, long ere the Spaniard came, ripe for
death ? History preserves one brief fragment which
goes to show that the Incas themselves were not
altogether 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 tempest,
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 (Ecodoma,
but the splendid civilisation of the children of the
sun, albeit it bore on the face of it the impress of
unchangeableness and endless duration, 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 thorough-
fare 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 carrying 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.

138 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

It is always pleasant to have even a hypothetical
somebody on whom to shuffle the responsibility 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 Spallan-
zani 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 the crazy bell-wether has
led the way: soon the hundreds 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 labours, 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 dreadful cavern will be a slight depression
in the soil.

Satisfied with the result, I resume my solitary ram-
ble, and by-and-by coming upon a fine Escandalosa
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 bestowed on

IDLE DAYS 139

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 con-
sumed to ashes with a marvellous noise of hissing
and crackling. And thus the bush I have found
burns itself up on my placing 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, flourished a moment
ago, I begin 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 industrious 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 labours. 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 pro-
genitors survives in us still ? Who that has noticed

Ho IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

monkeys 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 escaping from
conventional trammels into the solitude, what is it,
after all, but the delight of going back to nature,
to be for a time, what we arc always pining to
be, wild animals, unconfined monkeys, 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 inexpressible, 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 derisive
laughter. I feel myself blushing all over my face;
their jeering remarks become intolerable, and, owl-
like, 1 fly from their persecutions to hide myself
in a close thicket. There, with grey-green curtains

IDLE DAYS

141

about and around me, I lie on a floor of soft yellow
sand, silent and motionless as my neighbour the
little spider seated on his geometric web, till the
waning light and the flute of the tinamou send
me home to supper.

DOLICHOTIS PATAGONICA

CHAPTER X

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA

SUMMER, winter and spring, it was an un-
failing 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 wilderness
of the upland close at hand; just as in England 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 distance 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 migrants
newly arrived from the tropics, and the songs of the
resident species had acquired a greater vigour and
beauty. It was a pleasure simply to wander on and
on for hours, moving cautiously among the bushes,
pausing at intervals to listen to some new note; or
to hide myself and sit or lie motionless in the middle

0

142

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 143

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 favourite
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 travellers 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 especially 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
mocking-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 remarkable 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
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

144

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Calandria mocking-bird's performance and not be
very greatly missed.

The desire to say something on this subject was

CALANDRIA MOCKING-BIRD

strong in me at that time, for, leaving aside the
larger question of the bird music of South America,
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

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 145

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 melodists 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, bird sounds generally, are
seldom describable. We have no symbols to repre-
sent 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 odours of flowers. It is
hard, perhaps, to convince ourselves of this power-
lessness; 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 afterwards when
I heard them, and when almost every song came to
me as a surprise. It could not have been otherwise,

8

146 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

To name only half a dozen of the lesser British melo-
dists: the little jets of brilliant melody spurted out
by the robin; the more sustained lyric of the wren,
sharp, yet delicate: the careless half -song, half-
recitative of the common warbler; the small frag-
ments 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, unimaginable child —
who can give any idea of such sounds as these with
such symbols as words! It 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 nightingale,
I had been led by reading to expect to hear a dis-
tinctly plaintive song, and found it so far from plain-
tive that I was swayed to the opposite extreme,
and pronounced it (with Coleridge) a glad song. But

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 147

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 contrasts; the art was per-
fect, but there was no passion in it all — no human
feeling. Feeling of some un-human kind there perhaps
was, but not gladness, such as we imagine in the
skylark's song, and certainly not sorrow, nor any-
thing sad. Again, when we listen to a song that all
have agreed to call "tender," we perhaps recognise
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 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 favour with some easy-going naturalists,
and it is possible that those who use it do actually
believe that the printed word represents 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,

148 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 sky-
lark, 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 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. Doubtless 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 sound-
ing board; furthermore, the extremely distensible
oesophagus, although it has no connection with the
trachea, is puffed out with swallowed air when the
bird emits its notes, and this air, both when re-
tained 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

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 149

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 those that are uttered
by mammalians, as bellowings, 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

150 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 Impressions
of some British Song Birds, has said, that many of
the American songsters are shy wood-birds, seldom
seen or heard near the habitations of man, while
nearly all the British birds are semi-domesticated,
and sing in gardens and orchards; that this fact,
in connection with their more soft and plaintive
voices, made American song birds seem less to
the European traveller than his own. This state-
ment 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 comprises the whole of America south
of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Throughout the
tropical and sub-tropical 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
habitations of men, as if sweet voices were given to
them solely for the delectation of human listeners :
they are pre-eminently birds of the wild forest,
marsh, and savannah, and if one of their chief merits
has been overlooked, it is because the European
naturalist and collector, whose object is to obtain
many specimens, and some new forms, has no time

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 151

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 traveller who comes from thrush-
and warbler-haunted temperate lands." And Bates
says of the Amazonian forests: "The few sounds
of birds are of that pensive 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 travellers 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 disagreeable sounds
— the macaw and the peacock are examples; while
the sober-coloured birds of temperate regions, espe-
cially 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-coloured. To men-
tion only two South American 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

152 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

exception sober-coloured. The melodious goldfinch,
yellow bunting, linnet, blue tit, chaffinch, and
yellow wagtail would look very gay and conspicu-
ous among them. Yet these sober-coloured tropical
birds I have mentioned are not singers.

It must also be borne in mind that South America
embraces a great variety of climates; that all the
vast region, which comprises Chili, the southern 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 represented, and some
differ but slightly from European forms — the whistle
of the Argentine blackbird is sometimes mistaken
by Englishmen for that of the smaller home bird.
The mocking-birds form a group of the same family
(Turdidaj), but with more highly-developed vocal
powers. It is true that the tanagers, numbering
about four hundred species, mostly brilliantly-
coloured, some rivalling the humming-birds in the
vivid tints and metallic lustre of their plumage,
form an exclusively 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-contrasted colours,

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 153

are the troupials — Icteridae; 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
the sub-order Oscines, which have the developed
vocal organ — number about twelve hundred species:
— a big fact when it is remembered that of the five
hundred species of birds in Europe, only two hun-
dred 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
regions 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 intention
of attempting to describe their melody myself,
comparing it with that of England. Fortunately for
my purpose, not all the travellers 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 notable exceptions; from
these I shall proceed to quote a few passages in
support of my contention, beginning with Felix de

i54 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Azara, a contemporary of Buffon, and concluding
with the two most illustrious travellers of our own
day who have visited South America — Wallace
and Bates.

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 ab-
solutely 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 childhood
with the songsters of Europe, and in Paraguay and
La Plata he paid great attention to the language
of the species he describes. In his ever fresh Apun-
tamientos he says: "They are mistaken who think
there are not as many and as good songsters here as
in Europe"; and in the Introduction to the same
work, referring to Buffon's opinion concerning the
inferiority of the American songsters, 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 expres-
sive; nevertheless I count it among the first singers."
This opinion (with Daines Barrington's misleading
table in my mind) made me doubt the correctness

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 155

of his judgment, or memory, the wren in question
being an exceedingly cheerful singer; but when I
came to hear the nightingale, about whose song I
had 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 Tbyothorus and Cypborbinus, which
include the celebrated flute-birds and organ-birds of
tropical South America. D'Orbigny, in the Voyage
dans VAmerique 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 com-
parable 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 distance; at other times its sweet
and varied cadences are mingled with clear piercing
tones and deep throat-notes. We have really no
words, he concludes, adequate to express the effects
of this song, heard in the midst of a nature so re-
dundant, and of mountain scenery so wild and savage.

156 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Mr. Simson, in his Travels in the Wilds of Ecuador,
writes quite as enthusiastically of a species of Cypho-
rhinus 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 neighbourhood of these huts the realejo, or
organ-bird {Cyphorhinus cantans), the most remark-
able 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 pro-
duced by a human voice. Some musical boy must
be gathering fruits in the thicket, and is singing a
few notes to cheer himself. The tones become more
fluty and plaintive; they are now those of a flageolet,
and notwithstanding the utter impossibility of the
thing, one is for a moment convinced that someone
is playing that instrument. ... It is the only
songster which makes an impression on the natives,
who sometimes rest their paddles whilst travelling
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!

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 157

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

CYPHORHINUS CANTANS

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 brilliantly-
coloured 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

158 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

resembling those of the blackbird and robin, and
one bird gave forth three or four sweet plaintive
notes that particularly attracted our attention;
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 arrived
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 the beach; and so,
coming to birds, the piercing tones of the sandpiper,
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

BIRD MUSIC IN SOUTH AMERICA 159

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 over-
flowing 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 entirely 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 which a
countless number of varied instruments take part
in a performance in which there are many noisy dis-
cords, while the tender spiritual tones heard at inter-
vals seem, by contrast, infinitely sweet and precious.

CHAPTER XI

SICHT IN SAVAGES

IN Patagonia I added something to my small
stock of private facts concerning eyes — their
appearance, colour, 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 desperadoes — and in which he had
always been the victor, for his adversaries had all
been slain to a man. But his eyes, his most wonder-
ful 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, mush-
rooms growing in rings, and the shrinking of the

sensitive plant when touched, and will-o'-the-wisps,

i6q

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 161

and crowing hens, and the murderous attack of social
birds and beasts on one of their fellows, 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 astonishment 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 materialised.
Some person lately published in England a book
entitled Soul-Shapes, treating not only of the shapes
ol souls but also of their colour. The letterpress of
this work interests me less than the coloured plates
adorning it. Passing over the mixed and vari-
coloured souls, which resemble, in the illustrations,
coloured 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
coloured souls seem very much out of shape, like an
old felt hat or a stranded jelly-fish, the pure-coloured
blue soul is round, like an iris, and only wanted a
pupil to be made an eye.

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

162 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 spectacles,
the other a native, who was very impressive in his
manner, and was holding forth in a loud authorita-
tive 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, really 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 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 decadence in it; from
infancy to old age the world looks, they imagine,
the same, the grass as green, the sky as blue as ever,

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 163

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 spectacles 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 annoy-
ing 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-humouredly 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 further de-
cadence. Not satisfied with defending himself against
the charge of being a fantastical person 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 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

1 64 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 extinguisher,
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
— thev 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 dis-
tinctness and brightness seemed artificial and un-
canny. But in the end he was convinced, and then
he wanted 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 neighbours, and boasting of the miraculous
power they imparted to his eves of seeing the world
as no one else could see it.

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 165

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 recognise them as they were being
dealt out, by means of certain slight shades of
difference in the colouring of the backs. He had
turned his attention to this business when very
young, and as he was close upon fifty when he im-
parted this interesting piece of information, and
had always existed comfortably on his winnings, 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 pre-
ternaturally sharp-eyed individual was greatly sur-
prised 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 customs, the same motions;
in size, colour, 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 interests
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

166 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

to us, are not seen so sharply, and soon become
blurred in memory; and if there happens to be a
pretty close resemblance in several oi them, as in
the case of my gambling friend's half - a - dozen spar-
rows, which, like snowflakes, 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 appear vividly and close to us, and are
permanently photographed on the mind; the other
which sees things at a distance, and with that in-
distinctness of outline and uniformity of colour
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 in their profession,
see faces more sharply than most people, and re-
member them as distinctly as others remember the
faces of a very limited number of individuals — of
those they love or fear or constantly associate with.
Sailors see atmospheric changes which are not appa-
rent 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 pur-
suits which men have; each person inhabits a little

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 167

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 difference
is so great that ours is a dim decaying sense com-
pared with their brilliant faculty, and that only
when we survey the prospect through powerful
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, on account
of their simple natural life in the desert, 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 them-
selves 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 deteriorating.
The eye's adaptiveness did not get sufficient credit.
We know how the muscles may be developed by

1 68 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

training, that the blacksmith and prizefighter 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. Whatever the origin of
the error may have been, it is certain that it has
received the approval of scientists, 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
malformations. That such eye-defects are as common
among savages as among ourselves, I do not say, and
to this matter I shall return later on; but until the
eyes of savages are scientifically examined, it seems
a very bold thing to say that defective colour-sense
is due to the inimical conditions of our civilisation;
for we know as little about the colour-sense of savages
as we do about the colour-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 teachers were misled by
travellers' tales, and perhaps by other considerations,
as, for instance, the absence of artificial aids to
sight among the children of nature. The redskin
may be very old, but as he sits sunning himself

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 169

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 afterwards,
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-coloured object, which might be a bush,
or stone, or animal of some large kind, or even a
house. The secret of the difference 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 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 civilised 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 perhaps, was a child of
civilisation and a reader of books, and, what is
perhaps even more, the descendant of a long line of
bookish men. This amazed me at the moment, for
until then my childlike faith in the belief of Hum-
boldt, and of the world generally, on the subject had
never been disturbed. Now I see how this curious
thing happened. The object was at such a distance

170 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 in-
stinct, 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 bulrushes,
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.
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 traru being
a large, black, eagle-like bird of the plains, the
carancho of the whites — Polyborns tharus. But the
object was not necessarily 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 accustomed to see at all distances — a figure
in the landscape 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,

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 171

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
proof-reader 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 objects quickly
and guess their nature correctly. His daily food,
the recovery of his lost animals, and his personal safety
depend on it; and it is not, therefore, strange that
every blot of dark colour, every moving and motion-
less object on the horizon, tells its story better to him
than to a stranger; 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-tropi-
cal 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

172 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 un-
known wilderness of thorns, and has only his arrows
to provide food for himself and his wife and children.
He does not get pierced with thorns and bitten by
serpents, because 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 foot
where he can safely set it, or, quickly choosing
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 colouring is so difficult to be dis-
tinguished on the brown earth, and among grey
sticks and sere and variegated leaves.

A friend of mine, Fontana of Buenos Ayres, who
has a life-long acquaintance with the Argentine
Indians, expresses the opinion that at the age of
twelve years the savage of the pampas has com-
pleted his education, and is thereafter able to take
care of himself; but that the savage of the Gran
Chaco — the sub-tropical Argentine territory border-
ing on Paraguay and Bolivia — if left to shift for
himself at that age would speedily perish, since he is
then only in the middle of his long, difficult, and

fcfofj

VIEWING A DISTANT OBJECT

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 175

painful apprenticeship. It was curious 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 trying 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, coloured like the ground,
and shaped like the dead curved sticks or vines seen
everywhere on the ground, and motionless like the
vine, does not more closely assimilate to its sur-
roundings than birds in trees often do — the birds
which the Indian must also see. A stranger in these
regions, even the naturalist 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 greenness 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 labelled "Where's the
Cat?" or "Mad Bull," or "Burglar," or "Policeman,"

176 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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-coloured snake,
seen previously but not distinguished — the object
sought for appears, and is thereafter so plain to
the eye that one cannot look at the sketch, even held
at a distance, without seeing the cat, or policeman,
or whatever it happens to be. And after patiently
studying some scores or hundreds of these puzzles
one gets to know just how to find the thing con-
cealed, 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 resem-
blances, 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 sunlight
above, and dull-hued or variegated earth and stones
and dead and withering herbage underneath.

It is possible that slight differences may exist in
the seeing powers of different nations, due to the
effect of physical conditions: thus, the inhabitants
of mountainous districts and of dry elevated table-

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 177

lands may have a better sight than dwellers in low,
humid, and level regions, although just the reverse
may be the case. Among European nations the
Germans are generally supposed to have weak eyes,
owing, some imagine, to their excessive indulgence
in tobacco; while others attribute the supposed decay
to the form of type used in their books, which requires
closer looking 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 probably the decadence has been a great deal
exaggerated. 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 per-
petual 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 mis-
take 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

M

178 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

civilisation 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 under-
ground, whose day is the dim glimmer of a miner's
lamp? "An organ exercised beyond its wont will
grow, and thus meet increase of demand by in-
crease of supply," Herbert Spencer 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; civili-
sation, in such cases, has put too great a strain on
that organ, 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 action of
natural selection. Nature pulls one way and we pull
the other, compassionately trying to save the unfit
from the consequences of their unfitness. The humane
instinct compels us; but the cruel instinct of the
savage is less painful to contemplate than that
mistaken or perverted compassion which seeks to
perpetuate unfitness, and in the interest of suffering
individuals inflicts a lasting 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

SIGHT IN SAVAGES 179

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 principal London journals spoke of this
very thing in terms of rapturous approval, and
looked forward 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 civilisation!

Pelleschi, in his admirable book on the Chaco
Indians, says that malformations are never seen in
these savages, that physically they are all perfect
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 without 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 decadence of the
eye in civilised man quote Humboldt's words about
the miraculous sight of South American savages,
they quote an error. It is not strange that Hum-
boldt 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 ob-
serve and infer, and his inferences, like those of the
savage, were sometimes wrong.

The savage sight is no better than ours for the
simple reason that a better is not required. Nature

180 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

has given to him, as to all her creatures, only what
was necessary, and nothing for ostentation. Stand-
ing on the ground, his horizon is a limited one; and
the animals he preys on, if often sharper-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 animal 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. More-
over, other faculties may usurp the eye's place, or
develop so greatly as to make the eye of only second-
ary importance 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 distance.
Another remarkable case is that of the armadillo.
Of two species I can confidently say that, if they
are not blind, they are next door to blindness; yet

SIGHT IN SAVAGES

181

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 marvellously acute, and,
as in the case of the mole, it has made sight super-
fluous. 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 better 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.

GAUCHO WITH SPECTACLES

CHAPTER XII

CONCERNING EYES

WHITE, crimson, emerald green, shining
golden yellow, are amongst the colours
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
appropriate 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-imitating atti-
tude 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 taxidermist, who
has given a life to his bastard art, produces 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 stuffer's work is endurable because use-
ful; but in a drawing-room, who does not close his
eyes or turn aside to avoid seeing a case of stuffed

birds — those unlovely mementoes of death in their

182

CONCERNING EYES 183

gay plumes ? Who does not shudder, albeit not with
fear, to see the wild cat, filled with straw, yawn-
ing 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 considerable pride in the work of his hands.
I had just left tropical nature behind me across the
Atlantic, and the unexpected meeting with a tran-
script 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 colour and great splendour
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 intimidate 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-
coloured eye, or even of the white eye of some raptorial
species, as, for instance, of the common South Ameri-
can hawk, Asturina pucherani. Violent emotions are
associated in our minds — possibly, also, in the minds
of other species — with certain colours. Bright red

1 84 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 colouring 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 safe-
guarded in many ways; but when protective re-
semblances, flight, and instincts of concealment all
fail, and it is compelled to engage in a real struggle
with a living adversary, it is provided for such
occasions with another set of defences. 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 practised. It is not possible to believe
that the colouring of the crystal globes, towards
which an opponent's sight is first directed, and which
most vividly exhibit the raging emotions within, can
have been entirely neglected as a means of defence
by the principle of selection in nature. For all these
reasons I believe the bright-coloured eye is an im-
provement on the dark eye.

Man has been very little improved in this direction,
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

CONCERNING EYES 185

for man in a state of nature, being mild where fierce-
ness of expression is required; it is almost unknown
amongst the inferior creatures; and only on the
supposition that the appearance 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 human 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 individuals,
light hazel and blue-grey being apparently 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 person with large brown spots
on light blue-grey eyes whose children all inherited
the peculiarity; also another with reddish hazel
irides thickly marked with fine characters resem-
bling Greek letters. This person was an Argentine
of Spanish blood, and was called by his neighbours
ojos escritos, or written eyes. It struck me as a very
curious circumstance that these eyes, both in their

1 86 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

ground colour 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 eye its iris mystic-lettered —
That's my name!

But we look in vain amongst men for the splendid
crimson, flaming yellow, or startling white orbs
which would have made the dark-skinned brave,
inspired by violent emotions, a being terrible 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 species,
has always, I believe, a hostile purpose. When found
in inoffensive species, as, for instance, in the lemurs,
it can only be attributed to mimicry, and this would
be a parallel case with butterflies mimicking the
brilliant "warning colours" of other species on which
birds do not prey. Cats amongst mammals, and owls
amongst birds, have been most highly favoured;
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

CONCERNING EYES 187

with the startling suddenness of a cloud illumined
by flashes of lightning, the yellow globes of the owl
are unparalleled. Some readers might think my
language exaggerated. Descriptions of bright sun-
sets 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 presenting 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 sublimed by its fury into
a weird and terrible object.

Nature has many surprises for those who wait on
her; one of the greatest she ever favoured 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 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, stealing 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

1 88 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 because of their mother's death. But I wanted
that bird badly, and hardened my heart; the "de-
moniacal laughter" with which he had so often
answered the rushing sound of the swift black river
at eventide would be heard no more. I fired; he
swerved on his perch, remained suspended for a few
moments, 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 supreme effort.
Even in repose he is a big eagle-like bird; now his
appearance was quite altered, and in the dim, un-
certain 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-coloured
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

CONCERNING EYES

189

one, then of the other wing touched the ground.
The black horns stood erect, while in the centre of
the wheel-shaped head the beak snapped incessantly,

D 7

■

MAGELLANIC EAGLE-OWL

producing a sound resembling 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 fascination, not unmixed with fear
when I remembered the agony of pain suffered on
former occasions from sharp, crooked talons driven

igo IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

into me to the bone. The irides were of a bright
orange colour, but every time I attempted to ap-
proach the bird they kindled into great globes of
quivering yellow flame, the black pupils being sur-
rounded 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
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 appear-
ance is one hard to answer. We know that the
source of the luminosity in owls' and cats' eyes is
the tapetum 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 appearance was accompanied with, or fol-
lowed by, a burning or smarting sensation. I will
here quote a very suggestive passage from a letter
on this subject written to me bv a gentleman of great
attainments 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 another

CONCERNING EYES 191

form of the phenomenon. It probably depends upon
some extra-sensibility of the retina analogous to
what exists in the molecular constitution of sul-
phide of calcium and other phosphorescent sub-
stances. The difficulty is in the scintillation. We
know that light of this character has its source in the
heat vibrations of molecules at the temperature of in-
candescence, and the electric light is no exception
to the rule. A possible explanation is that supra-
sensitive retinae in times of excitement become
increasedly phosphorescent, and the same excite-
ment causes a change in the curvature of the lens,
so that the light is focussed, 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 exaggera-
tions. One would not look for these fiery eyes amongst
the peaceful children of civilisation, who, when they
make war, do so without anger, and kill their ene-
mies 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

192 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

great tears of rage, but I have never seen anything
in them even approaching to that fiery appearance
described in the owl.

Nature has done comparatively little for the human
eye, not only in denying it the terrifying splendours
found in some other species, but also in the minor
merit of beauty. When going about the world one
cannot help thinking that the various races and tribes
of men, differing in the colour of their skins and in
the climates and conditions they live in, ought to
have differently-coloured eyes. In Brazil, I was
greatly struck with the magnificent 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 head-
dresses; 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 exqui-
site type of female beauty which we see in the white
girl with a slight infusion of negro blood, giving the
graceful 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 lemurs' 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 Polynesians and

CONCERNING EYES 193

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.

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 "eme-
rald eye" has been greatly praised by the poets,
particularly by those of Spain. Emerald eyes, if
they only existed, would certainly be beautiful
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 climates, 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 seeking 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 unscien-
tific ones — are without any settled and correct ideas
about the colour of our own eyes, they have endorsed
the poet's fable, and have even taken considerable

N

i94 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

pains to persuade the world of its truth. Dr. Paul
Broca is their greatest authority. In his Manual jor
Anthropologists he divides human eyes into four
distinct types — orange, green, blue, grey; and these
four again into five varieties each. The symmetry
of such a classification suggests at once that it is
an arbitrary one. Why orange, for instance ? Light
hazel, clay colour, red, dull brown, cannot properly
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 grey varieties the lightest
grey is made so very light that only when placed
on a sheet of white paper does it show grey at all;
but there is always some colour in the human skin,
so that Broca's eye would appear absolutely white
by contrast — a thing unheard of in nature. Then we
have the green, beginning 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 grey grey, because in
such eyes there is no yellow or brown pigment on
the outer surface of the iris to prevent the dark-
purple pigment— the uvea — on the inner surface from
being seen through the membrane, which has different
degrees of opacity, making the eye appear grey,
light or dark blue, or purple, as the case may be.
When yellow pigment is deposited in small quantity
on the outer membrane, then it should, according

CONCERNING EYES 195

to the theory, blend with the inner blue and make
green. Unfortunately for the anthropologists, it
doesn't. It only gives in some cases the greenish
variable tinge I have mentioned, but nothing ap-
proaching to the decided greens of Broca's tables.
Given an eye with the right degree 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 colour, 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-grey, or brownish-blue, or clay colour,
and in some rare instances shows a changeable
greenish hue.

In the remarks accompanying the Report of the
Anthropometric Committee of the British Associa-
tion for 1 88 1 and 1883, it is said that green eyes are
more common than the tables indicate, and that
eyes that should properly be called green, owing to
the popular prejudice against that term, have been
recorded as grey or some other colour.

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 ? No doubt
the "popular prejudice" is supposed to have its
origin in Shakespeare's description of jealousy as a

196 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

green-eyed monster ; but if Shakespeare has any
great weight with the popular mind, the prejudice
ought to be the other way, since he is one of those
who sing the splendours 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 question
of the popular prejudice is not worth arguing 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 fashionably-
dressed lady, of a singularly attractive appearance,
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 furtively, 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, exquisitely beautiful sea-green, as sea-
water looks with a strong sunlight in it, where it is
deep and pure, in the harbour of some rocky island
under the tropics. At length, not yet convinced, I

CONCERNING EYES 197

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
grey, and not very pure in colour. Having looked
green when viewed obliquely, they could not be a
very pure grey: they were simply grey eyes with
an exceedingly thin pigment, so thin as not to appear
as pigment, 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, some-
times look pure green. I know a dog, now living, whose
eyes in such circumstances always appear of that
colour. 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 making
them quite unclassifiable, as no two pairs of eyes are
found alike — then all eyes might be divided 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-grey 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 from brown; and all eyes without
pigment, even the purest greys, have some blueness.

Brown eyes express animal passions rather than
intellect and the higher moral feelings. They are

198 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

frequently equalled in their own peculiar kind of
eloquence by the brown or dark eyes in the domestic
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-civilised commu-
nities, individual exceptions are extremely numerous.
Spanish and negro women have wonderfully soft and
loving eyes, while the cunning weasel-like eye is
common everywhere, especially amongst Asiatics. In
high-caste Orientals the keen, cunning look has been
refined and exalted to an appearance of marvellous
subtlety — the finest expression of which the black eye
is capable.

The blue eye — all blues and greys being here in-
cluded— is par excellence the eye of intellectual man :
that outer warm-coloured pigment hanging like a
cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its most
spiritual emanations, so that only when it is quite
blown away are we able to look into the soul, for-
getting 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

CONCERNING EYES 199

nature, if not a positive blunder; for its power of
expressing the lower and commonest instincts and
passions of our race is comparatively limited; and
in cases where the higher faculties are undeveloped
it seems vacant and meaningless. Add to this that
the ethereal blue colour is associated in the mind with
atmospheric phenomena rather than with solid matter,
inorganic or animal. It is the hue of the void, ex-
pressionless sky; of shadows on far-off hill and cloud;
of water 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 highest faculties
of the mind, do we see the full beauty and signifi-
cance of the blue eye — the eye, that is, without the
interposing cloud of dark pigment covering it. In
the biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the authoi
says of him: "His eyes were large, dark-blue,
brilliant, and full of varied expression. 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 gipsy woman, meeting him suddenly
in a woodland path, gazed at him and asked;

200 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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

I may say here that gipsies are so accustomed
to concentrate their sight on the eyes of the people
they meet that they acquire a marvellous proficiency
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: "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 bim, 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,
I have known to whom the above description would
apply in every particular; a man whose intellectual
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 express
the instincts and passions of savages, but able to
express the intelligence, high moral feelings, and

CONCERNING EYES 201

spirituality which a humane civilisation was, long
ages after, to develop in his torpid brain! A fact
like this seems to fit in with that flattering, fascin-
ating, ingenious hypothesis invented by Wallace to
account for facts which, according to the theory of
natural selection, ought not to exist.

In answer to the question, What is the colour 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 sur-
prisingly great difference in the eyes of the two
classes into which the population is practically di-
visible— the well-to-do class and the poor. I began
my observations in London — there is no better
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 way hundreds of pairs
of eves could be seen in the course of a dav. In
Cheapside the population seemed too mixed; but
in Piccadilly, and Bond Street, and along Rotten
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

202 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 colour of the English eye is, so great
is the variety. Every shade of grey and blue, from
the faint cerulean of a pale sky, to the ultramarine,
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 resembling 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 surprising 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.

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 grey, or
grey-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 yellowish tinge
being visible round the pupil. My conclusion was,
that this impure grey 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.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA

NEAR 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 significance. It is as follows, and the italicisation
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 characterised
only by negative possessions; without habitations,
without water, without trees, without mountains,
they support only a few dwarf plants. Why, then —
and the case is not peculiar to myself — have these and
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 impression ? I can scarcely
analyse these feelings, but it must be partly owing
to the free scope given to the imagination. The
plains of Patagonia are boundless, 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 supposed, the flat earth
was surrounded by an impassable breadth of water,

or by deserts heated to an intolerable excess, who

203

204 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 naturalist —
those desolate regions have ceased to be impracticable,
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 Rio 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 traveller's
imagination as the glittering capital of great Manoa,
which Alonzo Pizarro and his false friend Orellana
failed to discover. The traveller of to-day really
expects to see nothing more exciting than a solitary
huanaco keeping watch on a hilltop, and a few grey-
plumaged rheas flying from him, and, possibly, a
band of long-haired roving savages, with their faces
painted black and red. Yet, in spite of accurate
knowledge, the old charm still exists in all its fresh-
ness; and after all the discomforts and sufferings

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 205

endured in a desert cursed with eternal barrenness,
the returned traveller 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 accounts for
the comparatively unfading character of the images
that date back to the period of childhood, when we
are most emotional. Judging from my own case,
I believe that we have here the secret of the per-
sistence of Patagonian images, and their frequent
recurrence in the minds of many who have visited
that grey, 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 deso-
late spots in Patagonia, Darwin remarks: "Yet, in
passing over these scenes, without one bright object
near, an ill-defined but strong sense of pleasure is
vividly excited." 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 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

206 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 colour, 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 wonder and admiration — feelings which the
Patagonian wastes could not inspire — but the grey,
monotonous 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 Rio 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 habit-
able, 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 horse-
back 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 grey universal thicket,
than I would find myself 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 solitary and remote seemed that grey waste,
stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 207

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 hermitage of
brushwood or dug-out in the side of a cliff, and dwelt
there until I had grown grey 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 valley.
Sometimes a Dolicbotis, starting up at my approach,
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 whur of
wings; or on some distant hill-side a bright patch
of yellow, ot a deer that was watching me, appeared

208 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

and remained motionless for two or three minutes.
But the animals were few, and sometimes I would
pass an entire day without seeing one mammal, and
perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size.
The weather at that time was cheerless, generally
with a grey 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 together
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. Everywhere through the light,
grey mould, grey as ashes and formed by the ashes
of myriads of generations of dead trees, where the
wind had blown on it, or the rain had washed it
away, the underlying yellow sand appeared, and the
old ocean-polished pebbles, dull red, and grey, and
green, and yellow. On arriving at a hill, I would
slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey
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
grey everlasting thorny vegetation. How grey it
all was! hardly less so near at hand than on the

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 209

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 white-
ness 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
greyness. 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 composed of twenty to
thirty trees, about eighteen feet high, and taller than
the surrounding trees. They were growing at a con-
venient distance 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 yellow sand. This grove was on a hill differing
in shape from other hills in its neighbourhood, so
that it was easy for me to find it on other occasions;
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
o

210 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 hill-
side. I thought nothing 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 associated 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 with-
out being tired, that noonday pause, during which
1 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 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 fluttering motion
and no whisper in the small stiff undeciduous leaves;
and the bushes stand unmoving as if carved out of

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 211

stone. One day while listening 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.
Elsewhere 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
active when I travelled at a swinging gallop. This
was doubtless habit; but now, with a horse under
me, I had become incapable of reflection: my mind
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 something 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 meeting with an adventure,
and felt as free from apprehension 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

212 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

feeling of elation, 1 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 in-
stantaneous 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 frequently happens
that the revived instinct is so purely animal in char-
acter and repugnant to our refined or humanitarian
feelings, that it is sedulously concealed and its
promptings resisted. In the military and seafaring
vocations, and in lives of travel and adventure, these
sudden and surprising reversions are most frequently
experienced. The excitement affecting men going
into battle, which even affects those who are con-
stitutionally timid and will cause them to exhibit
a reckless daring and contempt of danger astonishing
to themselves, is a familiar instance. This instinctive
courage has been compared to intoxication, but it
does not, like alcohol, obscure a man's faculties : on
the contrary, he is far more keenly active to every-
thing going on around him than the person who

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 213

keeps perfectly cool. The man who is coolly cour-
ageous in fight has his faculties in their ordinary
condition: the faculties of the man who goes into
battle inflamed with instinctive, joyous excitement
are sharpened to a preternatural keenness.1 When
the constitutionally timid man has had an experience
of this kind he looks back on the day that brought
it to him 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 ter-
rible danger, the change of nature we undergo is
equally great. In some cases fear paralyses us,
and, like animals, we stand still, powerless to move
a step in flight, or to lift a hand in defence of our
lives; and sometimes we are seized with panic, and,
again, act more like the inferior animals 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 courage, sharp, quick apprehension,
and swift decision. This is a miracle very common
in nature; man and the inferior animals alike, when
confronted with almost certain death "gather re-
solution from despair." We are accustomed to call

1 In an article on "Courage" by Lord Wolseley, in the Fortnightly
Review for August 1889, there occurs the following passage, 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."

214 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 nothing felt but a wonderful
strength and fury and daring. Looking back at
certain perilous moments in my own life, I remember
them with a kind of joy; not that there was any
joyful excitement then, but because they brought
me a new experience — a new nature, as it were
— and lifted 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
courage, which flashes out so brightly on occasions,
is inherited by a very large majority of the male
children born into the world; only in civilised 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 Gallic ignor-
ance of fox-hunting in England when he made his
French gentleman gallop over the hounds and dash
away to capture the fox himself; 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 civilised way, and has neverthe-
less attacked it, driven by a sudden uncontrollable

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 215

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 achievements
in the field ? After it, all legitimate sport would
seem illegitimate, and whole hecatombs of hares and
pheasants, and even large animals, fallen before his
gun, would only stir in him a feeling of disgust and
self-contempt. He would probably hold his tongue
about a combat of that brutal kind, but all the same
he would gladlv 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 distance.
The feeling occasionally bursts out in The Story of
My Heart: "To shoot with a gun is nothing. . . .
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 Jefferies 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

216 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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, as
we have seen, there are in life miraculous moments
when the cocoon suddenly dissolves, or becomes
transparent, and he is permitted to see himself in
his original nakedness. The delight which children
experience on entering woods and other wild places
is very keen; and this feeling, although it diminishes
as we advance in life, remains 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 delight, and was
strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not
that I was hungry then, except for the wildness
which he represented."

In almost all cases — those in which danger is
encountered and rage experienced being exceptions
— the return to an instinctive or primitive state of

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 217

mind is accompanied by this feeling of elation, which,
in the very young, rises to an intense gladness, and
sometimes makes them mad with joy, like animals
newly escaped from captivity. And, for a similar
reason, the civilised life is one of continual repression,
although it may not seem 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 experienced
on going back to a mental condition we have out-
grown, which I had in the Patagonian solitude; for
I had undoubtedly gone back;, and that state of
intense watchfulness, or alertness rather, with sus-
pension of the higher intellectual faculties, repre-
sented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks
little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his in-
stinct; he is in perfect harmony with nature, and is
nearly on a level, mentally, 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 them-
selves so vividly on the mind, and remain fresh in
memory, and return frequently; while other scenery,
however 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

218 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 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 distance,
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 odours should float o'er my dust,
My bones, full of gladness uprising, would dance in the sepulchre !

And we ourselves are the living sepulchres 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 sepulchre.

Professor W. K. Parker, in his work On Mam-
malian Descent, speaking of the hairy covering
almost universal in this class of animals, savs:
"This has become, as everyone knows, a custom

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 219

among the race of men, and shows, at present, no
sign of becoming obsolete. Moreover, that first corre-
lation, namely, milk -glands and a hairy covering,
appears to have entered the very soul of creatures
of this class, and to have become psychical as well as
physical, for in that type, which is only inferior to
the angels, the fondness for this kind of outer cover-
ing 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 Waterton 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 correlation not apply to this part ? The
face is pleasantly 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 exercise,
the sensation to the face is extremely agreeable, but
far from agreeable to the body where the covering
does not allow the moisture to evaporate 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
civilised fellow-traveller shiver in his furs. Again,
what a relief, what a pleasure, to throw off the
clothes when occasion permits. Leigh Hunt wrote

220 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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. Everyone 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 region
where nothing but a fig-leaf has "entered the soul,"
we see men and women going about naked and un-
ashamed, we experience a slight shock; but it has
more pleasure than pain in it, although we are
reluctant to admit the pleasure, probably because
we mistake the nature of the feeling. If, after seeing
them for a few days in their native simplicity, our
new friends appear before us clothed, we are shocked
again, and this time disagreeably 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 infinitely more
perfect than the new, and if there be such a thing
as historical memory in us, it is not strange that

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 221

the sweetest moment in any life, pleasant or dreary,
should be when Nature draws near to it, and, taking
up her neglected instrument, 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 environ-
ment, why should it be experienced in a greater
degree in the Patagonian desert than in other solitary
places — a desert which is waterless, where animal
voices are seldom heard, and vegetation is grey
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 regions, the cheerful verdure
and bright colours of flower and insects, if we
have acquired a habit of looking closely at these
things, and the melody and noises of bird-life engage
the senses; there is movement and brightness; new
forms, animal and vegetable, are continually appear-
ing, 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 minimised.
In Patagonia the monotony of the plains, or expanse
of low hills, the universal unrelieved greyness of
everything, and the absence of animal forms and
objects new to the eye, leave the mind open and 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

222 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

which shadows and sunlight and nearness and distance
give, and motion of waves and white flash of foam.
It has a look of antiquity, of desolation, of eternal
peace, of a desert that has been a desert from of old
and will continue a desert for ever; and we know
that its only human inhabitants are a few wandering

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA

savages — who live by hunting as their progenitors
have done for thousands of years. Again, in fer-
tile savannahs and pampas there may appear no
signs of human occupancy, but the traveller 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 mitigates
the effect of nature's wildness on the spirit. In
Patagonia no such thought or dream of the

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 223

approaching changes to be wrought by human agency
can affect the mind. There is no water there, the
arid soil is sand and gravel — pebbles 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
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," "unaccountable," he does
not conceal them. This is the "something uncanny
in Thoreau" which seems inexplicable and startling
to such as have never been startled by nature, nor
deeply moved; but which, to others, imparts a
peculiarly delightful aromatic flavour to his writings.
It is his wish towards a more primitive mode of
life, his strange abandonment when he scours the
wood like a half-starved hound, and no morsel could
be too savage 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
unaccountably familiar, so that he came and went

224 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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
more than touch the surface of so large a subject as
that of the instincts and remains of instincts exist-
ing 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 uncivilised 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 natural selection — would
predispose him to take such a view. My own experi-
ence 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 described — seemed to
furnish an answer to a question 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 communities and tribes of men should

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 225

exist — "are contented to exist," we often say, just
as if they had any choice in the matter — for ages
and for thousands of years in a state of pure bar-
barism, living from hand to mouth, exposed to ex-
tremes of temperature, and to frequently-recurring
famine even in the midst of the greatest fertility,
when a little foresight — "the smallest amount of
intelligence possessed by the lowest of mankind,"
we 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 counterbalance their
physical disadvantages. That instinctive state of
the human mind, when the higher faculties ap-
pear 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
clearness; and we can imagine that if the animal
could think and reason, thought would be super-
fluous 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.

226 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

other questions, some of which would probably be
thought "more curious than edifying." 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 un-
conscionable slowness; 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 falling, 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 achievement of the intellect, seems

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 227

like a pale dim feeling? It is because in our inmost
natures, our deepest feelings, we are still one with
the savage. We admire a Gordon less for his god-
like qualities — his spirituality, and crystal purity of
heart, and justice, and love of his kind — than for that
more ancient nobility, the qualities he 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
prize-fighter who enters a den full of growling lions,
and drives them before him like frightened 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, sacrificing our lives, as we say,
in the cause of humanity, 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 oppressive
atmosphere, and suffering excruciating pains from a
gouty foot; yet making no sign and concealing his
anguish under a smiling countenance. 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

228 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

with wounded men after a fight. But the savage
always endures pain more stoically than the civilised
man. He is

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

However great the sufferings of the gouty premier
may have been, they were less than those which
any Indian youth in Guiana and Venezuela volun-
tarily subjects himself to before he ventures to call
himself a man, or to ask for a wife. Small in com-
parison, yet he did not endure them smilingly
because the traditional pride and other feelings 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 savage, 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 be-
come conscious of it on account of the circumstances
of their lives. The only wonder is that the stern
indomitable spirit in us should ever in any circum-
stances 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 follows 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 companies and nations; knaves, fools,

THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 229

and murderers there may be; men may have mean
and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble
and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature,
that over any ignominious blemish in him all his
fellows 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 keenest
anguish at the spectacle of a valour-ruined man.
Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, com-
pletely 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 favour of
this animal and primitive nature in us. Thoreau,
albeit so spiritually-minded, could yet "reverence"
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 civilisation
more equal in its ameliorating effect on all classes
— if there must be classes — and more likely to endure,
it is perhaps a fortunate 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 respect-
able 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

I 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 woodbine, to keep
company there with a few straggling poppies, with
hollyhock, red and white foxglove, and other coarse
and weed-like plants, all together forming a kind
of horizon, dappled with colour, to the garden on
that side, a suitable background to the delicate,
more valued blooms. It has a neglected appearance,
its tall straggling stems insufficiently 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 Nature to be her most perfect type of
grace and ethereal loveliness, but who soon outgrew
her strength with all beauty of form, and who now
wanders abroad, careless of appearances, in a faded
flimsy garment, her fair yellow hair dishevelled, her
mournful eyes fixed ever on the earth where she
will shortly be.

I never pass this weedy, pale-flowered alien with-
out stooping to thrust my nose into first one blossom,

230

AN EVENING PRIMROSE

231

then another, and still another, until that organ, like
some industrious bee, is thickly powdered with the
golden dust. If, after an interval, I find myself once

EVENING PRIMROSE

more at the same spot, I repeat this performance
with as much care as if it was a kind of religious cere-
mony 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

232 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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
common, 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 perfume 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 approaches his nose to it.

My sole motive in smelling the evening primrose
is the pleasure it gives me. This pleasure 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 association. Why
is this pleasure so vivid, so immeasurably greater
than the mental pleasure afforded 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 important, is in man the most emo-
tional 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

AN EVENING PRIMROSE 233

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 recognise
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 Spanish, by its quaint native name of
James of the night, and, in English, primrose simply.
I recall with a smile that it was a shock to my childish
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 flowers 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 1 met with it again in
the swampy woods and everglades along the Plata
River; 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

234 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

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 remem-
ber that on first landing in Patagonia, on a desert
part of the coast, the time being a little after day-
break, 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 horizontal stems and a profusion of small
symmetrical 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 meas-
ured 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 consciously 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

AN EVENING PRIMROSE 235

are just opening to the pure over-arching sky, flushed
in its eastern half with tender colour; 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 sky and
scattered their pale yellow stars in millions 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 degree
on each repetition, until the feeling is exhausted.
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 cer-
tain path with his eyes fixed on the ground, remem-
bering that he once on a time dropped some valuable
article there, and although he knows that it was lost
irrecoverably, he still searches the ground for it.

Other vegetable odours 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,

236 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

among the tall poplar trees, their myriads 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 vertical branches, high
above the earth, forty or fifty 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 wonder-
fully 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 de-
scribed; but it is a picture only, until the fragrance
of the poplar touches the nerve of smell, and then
it is something 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 re-
corded of others), that the scent of some humble
flower or weed, familiar to him in boyhood, would

AN EVENING PRIMROSE 237

always affect him to tears, I presume that the poi-
gnant feeling of grief — grief, that is, for the loss of a
vanished happiness — which ended in tears, succeeded
to some such vivid representation of the past as I
have described, and to the purely delightful recovery
of a vanished sensation. Not only flowery and
aromatic odours 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, brush-
wood, and charcoal; the dank smell of marshes, and
the smell, "ancient and fish-like," that clings about
manv 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 that every reader can
add to the list from his own experience. Being 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 our
mental pictures of what we have seen by looking
again at their originals, they fade, and in the end
are lost. Bain appears to have the same opinion,
at all events he says: "The simplest impression that
can be made, of taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight,
needs repetition in order to endure of its own accord."
Probably it is a fact that when any scene, not yet

238 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

lost by the memory, a 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 pre-existent picture, and may there-
fore be said to freshen it. Most of the impressions
we receive are no doubt very transitory, but it is
certainly an error that all our mental pictures, not
freshened in the way described, fade and disappear,
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 colours, 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 brilliancy of colour. 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 odour
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
wilderness 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
at once forgotten. It is true that in the books
smell is classified along with taste, as being much

AN EVENING PRIMROSE 239

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. Rather the extreme delicacy of the olfac-

torv 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 odour has no phantasm in

the brain; or, to be very exact, the phantasm of

an odour, 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 mentally,

nothing but a formless, dim, whitish patch 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

240 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

distinctly make the effort; and in the case of some
strong odour 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 odours 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 con-
tradictory statements on this subject in his work on
The Senses and the Intellect, has the following sentence,
with which I agree: "By a great effort of the mind,
we may approach very near to the recovery of a
smell that we have been extremely familiar with,
as, for example, the odour 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.

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 odours.
Bain, as I have said, contradicts himself, and there-
fore, excepting in the sentence I have quoted, must

AN EVENING PRIMROSE 241

be put down among those who are against me; and
with him are McCosh, Bastian, Luys, Ferrier, and
others who 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 odours, in some
cases quoting the poet :

Odours, 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 reproduction
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 satisfy my-
self on the point, I consulted others, friends and
acquaintances, who all began trying to recall the
sensations produced on them by the odours they
were most familiar with. The result of their efforts
has restored my peace of mind. With the exception
of two or three ladies, who, having no male rela-
tions 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
Q

242 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

began to doubt, and finally with a feeling of impotence,
of being baffled, gave it up.

A simple mental experiment may serve to convince
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 something 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
distress 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
literally true, because in thinking of it they again
(in a sense) see and hear it. But to think of evil
odours does not affect us at all: we can, in imagin-
ation, uncork and sniff at cans of petroleum and
saturate our pocket-handkerchiefs with asafcetida 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 abominable smells in

AN EVENING PRIMROSE 243

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 hydrogen causes no pain, and
frangipane 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 odours :
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 de-
ficient as regards the power of being remembered";
but he did not discover the fact himself, nor does
he verify it from his own experience, merely telling
us that "Longet observes." But taste is not an
emotional sense. I know, for instance, that if I were
to partake of some once familiar, long-untasted
dish, flavoured, let me say, with some such abom-
ination (to the English palate) as cummin-seed or
garlic; some vegetable, or fruit, wild or cultivated,
that I never see in England, it would not move me
as I am moved by an odour, and would perhaps give
me less pleasure than a dish of strawberries and
cream. For in the flavour 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;
Q 2

244 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

therefore 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 flavours is not felt as a loss, and no effort 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, compared
with the other senses — namely, because, like sight
and hearing, it is an intellectual sense, and because,
unlike sight and hearing, its sensations are for-
gotten; and when after a long interval a forgotten
odour, once familiar and associated intimately with
the past, is again encountered, the sudden, unex-
pected recovery of a lost sensation affects us in
some such way as the accidental discovery of a store
of gold, hidden away by ourselves in some past
period of our life and forgotten; 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 recoverv of the irre-
coverable 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 recall 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

AN EVENING PRIMROSE 245

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 something that was
lost and is recovered, and consequently does not
move me. And so with the sensation of sight; I
cannot think of any fragrant flower that grows in
my distant home without seeing it, so that its beauty
may always be enjoyed; — but its fragrance, alas,
has vanished and returns not!

.... V-

iJSWilt*"1

WAKENING AT DAWN

INDEX

Albinism, Herman Melville on,
112; why we are unpleasantly
affected by, 113, 114

Animism, Dr. Tylor on, 117

Anumbius acuticaudatus , nest-
building habits of, 9

Apple Country, 102

Armadillos, 10, 12; bones of,
35; defective sight of , 1 80-1 81

Arrow-heads, Palaeolithic and
Neolithic, 35 ; highly - fin-
ished, 36

Asturina pucherani, a white-
eyed hawk, 183

Azara, Felix de, on song birds
in Paraguay, 154, 158

Bacon, on embroidery, 51

Bain, on duration of sense-
impressions, 237, 240, 243

Bates, on bird music in South
America, 151; on Cypho-
rhinns cantons, 156

Bird music, in Patagonia, 143;
in South America, 143-159;
difficult to describe, 145-149;
aerial character of, 1 49-1 50

Birds, song, number of species
in South America, 153

Blackbird, Argentine (Turdus
fuscater), 152

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

Broca, Dr. Paul, classification
of eyes, 194

Bubo magellanicus. See Owl

Button, a fancy of, 42; on
American song birds, 154

Burroughs, Mr. John, on British
and American song birds,

150
Buteo erythronotus , conspicuous-

ness of, 209
Buzzard, white-breasted, 209

Cachalote, 9

Cacti, fruit of, 46

Calandria mocking-bird (Mimus
modulator), song of, 143

Calodromus elegans, eggs of, 46;
voice and habits of, 130, 131

Carancho, 170

Carmen de Patagones, 19; at-
tacked by a Brazilian force,

91-95
Carrion-hawk (Milvago chim-

ango), 24
Carter, Dr. Brudenell, on weak

sight in civilised man, 179
Cathartes atratus, 49
Cavia australis, bones of, 35
Chanar tree, 14; fruit of. 46;

flowers of, 47
Chi-chi, 102

Children in Patagonia, 45-46
Chloephaga magellanica, 78
Chrysomitris magellanica. See

Siskin
Collie-dog, character of, 58, 59
Columba maculosa, depredations

of, 78; song, 122
Condalia spinosa, fruit of, 47
Condor, 53

Conspicuousness, effects of, 114
Coots, wheat destroyed by, 77
Courage, instinct of, 212-214

247

248

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Cow and pigs, friendship be-
tween, 54, 57

Coypu (Myiopotamus coypu),
bones of, 35

Craspedocephalus alternatus, 24

Ctenomys magellanica, bones of,
35; habits of, 128-130

Cusar-leofu, 32

Cuvier, effect of some odours on,
236

Cyphorhinns cantans, Bates on,

156

Dafila spinacauda, depreda-
tions of, 78

Darwin, on Craspedocephalus
alternatus, 25; on resem-
blance of animals to man, 25 ;
on singing birds in South
America, 143, 154; on how
the mind is affected by
Patagonian scenery, 205

Dasypus minutus, 10

Deer, bones of , 35 ; distant sight
of, 207

Dendrocolaptida?, 8

Diuca minor, morning song of,

13. 123
Dog, native, character of, 58

Dogs, anecdotes of, 58-72

Dolichotis patagonica, bones of,
35; observed watching me,
1 40; seen on the uplands, 207

D'Orbigny, on the flute-bird's
song, 155

Duck, brown pintail, 78

Dunes, 4, 11

Earthquake, shock of, experi-
enced at El Carmen, 97

Embemagra platensis. See Red-
billed finch

Escandalosa plant, 138

Evening primrose, 6; fragrance
of, 230; adaptiveness of, 233

Eyes, abnormal colour in, 160;
colour of in birds, 182 ; colour
of in men, 184; individual
variations in, 185; luminous,
186; owls', 187; green, 193;
Broca's table of colours of,
194; brown, 197; blue, 198;
British, 201-202

Falco sparverius, nesting in

cliffs, 134
Felis geoffroyi, 48
Firewood-gatherer, 10
Flamingo, shooting a, 63-66
Flute-bird, song of, 155
Fontana, Dr. G., on Indians of
the Pampas and Gran Chaco,
172
Franklin, Benjamin, a charac-
teristic of, 220

Gaucho with abnormal eyes,
160

Gauchos. dislike to spectacles of,
162

Germans, weakness of sight in,
177

Gould, his collection of hum-
ming-birds, 183

Greyhounds, hunting on their
own account, 59-60

Gums, edible, 46; chewing, 125-
127

Gurliaca decortican. See Chanar

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, eyes of,

199
Homorus gutturalis, habits of, 9

Ffuanaco, bones of, 35

Humboldt, on eyesight in

savages, 169, 179

INDEX

249

Hunt, Leigh, on the pleasure of

going to bed, 219, 220
Hunting, instinct of, 214

Icteridae, 153

Incas, the, rainbow-worship-
pers, 51 ; knowledge of
nature's laws of, 137

Indian remains, 34-41

burial-places, 41

Indians, life among the, 98-
108; eyesight of, 169, 170;
life-conditions of the, 171;
Fontana on, 172; Pelleschi
on, 179; instinctive courage,
226; endurance of pain, 228

Instincts, human, 212-229 ; in
children, 215-216; Dr. Wallace
on, 224

Itaparica, capture of the war-
ship, 95

Jefferies, Richard, instinctive

savage feelings, 215
Juniper, a gum-bearing, 125

La Merced, 19

Leaf-cutting ants, 135-138

Lichenops perspicillata, 192

Liquorice plant, 7

Little cock, amusing habits of,

128
Locke on mental pictures, 237
Locusts, depredations of, 77
Lombardy poplar, odour of, 235

Maken, 125

Manzanas, Las, 102

Martineta, 46

Melville, Herman, on the quality

of whiteness, 110-116; on

valour, 228, 229
Mendoza, destruction of, 97
Migration, 5

Military starling, 123

Milky sea, a, 119

Mill, J. S., a doctrine of, 81

Milvago chimango. See Carrion-
hawk

Mimus modulator. See Calandria
mocking-bird

Missionary Society, South
American, 27

Moby Dick, H. Melville's, no

Mocking-bird, Patagonian, 8,
123, 143; white-banded, 122;
calandria, 143-144

Mocking-birds, 155

Myiopotamus coypu. See Coypu

Nightingale, melody of, 146
Nothuva darwini, eggs of, 46

Oculto, habits of, 128-130
(Ecodoma ants, habits of, 135-

138
Organ-bird, Bates on the, 156
Ostriches, god of the, 121
Owl, Magellanic eagle, 187-190

Parker, Prof. W. K., on cloth-
ing, 218, 219

Parrots in Patagonia, 134

Patagonia, first sight of, 4-6;
legends, 4; salubrious cli-
mate of, 123-125; Darwin on
plains of, 203; explored, 204;
secret of charm of, 205;
description of scenery of,
205-210

Peccary, bones of, 35

Pelleschi on Gran Chaco In-
dians, 179

Phytotoma rutila. See Plant-
cutter

Picture puzzles, 175

Pigeons, rock, resting in cliff,

J34

250

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

Pigs and cow, friendship be-
tween, 54, 57

Piquellin, 47

Plant-cutter (Phytotoma rutila),
habits of, 8

Polar bear, man's fear of, 112,
113, 120

Polybori, 48

Polyborus tharus, flight of, 170

Primitive Culture, Dr. Tylor's,

117

Progne furcata, description of,
29; migration of, 30-31

Puma, a tree-climber, 48 ; abun-
dant on the Rio Negro, 76;
depredations of, 76

Rainbow, a brilliant, 50-51

Realejo, song of, 156

Red-billed finch (Embernagra
platensis), 24

Resemblance of inferior animals
to man, 26

Resemblances, imitative and
protective, in nature, 176

Retriever, character of the, 60,
61; account of a, 60-72

Revolver accident, 21

Rhea, bones of, 35; a white, 121

Rhinocrypta lanceolata, amusing
habits of, 128

Rio Negro, first sight of, 15;
colour of, 32, 33; valley of
the, 33; psychological effect
of the, 42-44, 47; extra-
ordinary sunset effect on, 52

Salix humboldtiana, 48
Scandalous, plant named, 138
Shark, white, fear inspired by,

112, 113

Sight in savage and civilised
men, 160-181

Simson, Mr., on the flute-bird

of Ecuador, 156
Siskin, black-headed (Chryso-

mitris icterica), 123, 236
Snakes, hard to detect, 175;

defective sight of, 180
Snow, at El Carmen, 109;

whiteness of, and effect on

the mind, 11 5-1 19
Song-sparrow (Zonotrichia cani-

capilla), 24
Sosa the Scout, anecdote of, 95
Soul-Shapes, treatise on, 161
South American Missionary

Society, 27
Spencer, Herbert, on adaptive-

ness of organs, 178
Swallow, white-rumped (Tachy-

cineta leucorrhoa), morning

song of, 23, 27; purple, 29;

migration of, 30-31
Swan, black-necked, 16
Synallaxis, 8

Tachycineta leucorrhoa. See
Swallow, white-rumped

Tanagers, 152

Thoreau, instinctive impulses
in, 216; on the robin's song,
218; feeling for nature in,
223

Thorn-bird, habits of, 9

Thurn, Mr. im, on paucity of
bird music in British Guiana,

151
Tinamous, eggs of, 46; language

and habits of, 128-130; seen

on the uplands, 207
Trapalanda, legend of, 4, 204
Traru, 170
Troglodytes furvus, Azara on

song of, 154
Troupials, number of species,

153

INDEX

251

Trupialis militaris. See Military

starling
Tuco-tuco, 35
Turdus fuscater. See Blackbird,

Argentine
Tylor, Dr., on animism, 117

Upland geese, 50; shooting, 68;
depredations of, 78

Upucerthia dumetoria, 8

Vignoli, Dr. de, on the mythical

faculty, 118
Vizcacha, bones of, 35
Vulture, black, 49

Wallace, Dr. A. R., on bird
music in the tropics, 157; on
human instincts, 224; pecu-
liar theory of, 224

Waterton, on bare feet, 219
Whale, The White, Melville's

romance, no
Whiteness, the quality of, 109-

121; abnormal, in animals,

121
White shark, fear inspired by,

112, 113
Willow trees on the Rio Negro,

Wolseley, Lord, on instinctive

courage, 213
Woodman, 9
Wren, La Plata, Azara on, 154;

character of song of, 154
Wrens, a highly melodious

family, 154-156

Zenaida maculata, song of, 122
Zonotrichia canicapilla. See
Song-sparrow

PRINTED BY

THE TEMPLE PRESS AT LETCHVVORTH

IN GREAT BRITAIN

W. H. HUDSON

NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION

Med. 8vo. 6s. net each volume

THE growing demand for the works of W. H. Hudson
has necessitated Messrs. J. M. Dent and Sons re-
issuing several volumes at a popular price so as to be
within the reach of all. Particulars of the first three
volumes are given below.

FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE
WRITER'S BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

With Frontispiece Portrait

*' To read his book is to read another chapter in that enormous
book which is written from time to time by Rousseau and George Sand
and Aksakoff among other people — a book which we can never read
enough of; and therefore we must beg Mr. Hudson not to stop here,
but to carry the story on to the farthest possible limits." — Times.

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

With Many Illustrations

Originally published in 1893, lt contains some of Mr. Hudson's
most characteristic work. Every page is infused with his human
philosophy, with his love of bird and beast, and the great open
spaces of nature. There are vivid pen pictures of his companions
and associates of these idle days, interesting sidelights on the
appearance and habits of the natives with whom he came in contact.

A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS

The title of this book was suggested to the author in a com-
mercial hotel by a "gentleman of the road," who travelled in
"something very large." The "commercial" of inferior rank
accepted the description and here exposes his wares, a miscellaneous
collection of stories, sketches, impressions, "things seen " and other
things overheard. The names of the articles are in themselves an
allurement, as witness the following samples: Little Girls 1 have
met, The Samphire Gatherer, Her Own Village, Apple Blossoms
and a Lost Village, Dimples, Wild Flowers and Little Girls, A Spray
of Southernwood.

1

W. H. HUDSON

A CONTEMPORARY OPINION

'With the passing out of W. H. Hudson, the English-
speaking world, perhaps the wide world, has lost its most
unique personality. This is said deliberately out of some
little knowledge of personalities and the world. He is
quite irreplaceable. Happily, his work preserves for us
his rare spirit and strange charm. ... No man, I think,
has ever realised Nature emotionally so completely as
Hudson, and no writer has been so able to pass on to
others that emotional realisation. The very simplicity
and intimacy of his prose, this singular faculty of giving
to his reader thought and feeling free from all barrier of
style, hides from that reader, as it were, the greatness of
his achievement. ... Of his books I have most love
for Far Away and Long Ago, for The Purple Land, El
Ombu (that great short story), for Green Mansions,
Afoot in England, and A Shepherd's Life — probably
because the artist in him takes, in those books, distinct
precedence over the naturalist. But, in truth, to compare
one book of Hudson's with another is much like dis-
secting the parts of a bird's flight. He was the fortunate
writer in that he found the way, for which we all grope,
to give his very self expression in all that he wrote."

John Galsworthy.

W. H. HUDSON'S

LAST BOOK

A HIND IN
RICHMOND PARK

Demy 8vo. 16s. net

"Hudson is a world to himself: a beautiful world of green
mansions, possibly; but a world familiar with the tragic sorrows of
mankind. A Hind in Richmond Park should be placed in the
hands of every doubter of the greatness of Hudson's genius.'' —
English Review.

DEAD MAN'S PLACK

Sf AN OLD THORN

Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net

"We knew Mr. Hudson could make beautiful things, but even
he has not made anything more beautiful than this story, unless it
may be the second story, An Old Thorn . The second is a moving tale
of a poor hind, taken for sheep-stealing in 1921, who on his last
despairing journey to the assizes pleads to be allowed to stand
beneath an old thorn tree of mystic power, and, with his tear-
soaked face pressed against. its bark, makes God knows what
inarticulate plea for help to the spirit within the tree. There is a
mastery in the telling of these two stories which is felt not only
in the reading but in the after taste. They are like a fine lyric;
one wants silence and meditation when one has read them fully
to savour them." — Manchester Guardian.

" A little crock of gold ... a rare and delicate flower ... a
triumphantly realised work of art ... a masterpiece." — Nation.

3

W. H. HUDSON

A CONTEMPORARY OPINION

" No contemporary writer showed a more leisurely
development than Hudson, and to no genius did our
public vouchsafe a more sluggish and halting recognition.
Hudson's example confounded the recognised categories
of 'naturalist' and 'poet,' of scientific reasoning and
creative imagination. While, as a naturalist, his know-
ledge was wide, deep, and exact, his observation of wild
nature and bird life is permeated with poetic spirituality
and human charm. His aesthetic sensibility and artistic
quality informed nearly everything he wrote. One of the
superiorities of his nature-books and essays on birds
to those of other naturalists lies in what may be called
their human perspective. The extension of his insight
in the life of wild nature does not curtail his human
interests: far from it. He does not isolate or rail off his
subject, a method which always produces a dry and
meagre effect, but shows it naturally through the medium
of human interests and associations. . . . Nature's
light and shading, her variability, elusiveness, mutability,
and fecundity are there on the printed page. Hudson's
nature writings appeal to the mind, to the heart, and the
senses together, like the works of all true artists and poets.
In his intense appreciation of beauty in nature, how-
ever, he far outstrips all his fellow-naturalists, Richard
Jeft'eries not excluded. And it is this aesthetic element in
his writings, springing from his force of passionate feeling,
that will preserve them no less than will the originality
of his contributions to science. His observations of bird
life are unique for the intensity of sympathy and delight
with which he cast himself into their world and mirrored
their kingdom for us through the glass of his passionate
joy in their shining loveliness. Hudson's whole attitude
to wild nature, indeed, marks a definite advance in civil-
ised man's spiritual consciousness of the beauty, the
riches, the glory of "the earth life," and here he joins
hands with the great poets and mystics." — Edward
Garnett in The Manchester Guardian.

4

BOOKS BY W. H. HUDSON

THE NATURALIST IN
LA PLATA

Large Cr. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net
With Numerous Illustrations by J. SMIT

"As strange and fantastic as the mythical marvels
of any famous fairy-tales are the wonders of bird and
insect life narrated in Mr. W. H. Hudson's delightful
collection of essays, and no less charmingly than pro-
fusely illustrated. The author keeps his technical erudi-
tion discreetly under control, and contents himself with
describing in strikingly pictorial language the habits,
recreations, and special characteristics of the South
American fauna. Nothing appears to have escaped his
scrutiny, and he has the fascinating gift of imparting
to his readers the contagion of his own intense interest
in the results of his observation. He tells us stories
without number of the idiosyncrasies of birds. There
are also two inimitable chapters treating of spiders, and
of freaks of nature which Mr. Hudson has seen and lost."
— Daily Telegraph.

"His skill in transliterating song is the gift not so
much of literary skill as of an ear peculiarly attuned to
the musical misrule of a bird's notes. . . . By another
sort of gift ... a gift of sympathetic interpretation, he
sets up a living picture. . . . How vivid this power was
appeared first in The Naturalist in La Plata, a book that
ranks with such classics as The Voyage of the Beagle."
— Observer.

5

W. H. HUDSON

A CONTEMPORARY OPINION

" He was a master of a peculiarly delicate, precise, and melodious
prose; he was a literary genius who was the best field-naturalist
in Britain, and a devotee of natural history who possessed a quite
extraordinary knowledge of English, Spanish, and American
literature, especially poetry (he introduced me to many an old
author I had never heard of); his personality, when you penetrated
a slight rugosity of crust and skirted his numerous but agreeably
salty prejudices, was very gracious and affectionate, if melancholy
and a little lacking in humour; all his life he has, except among
a tiny minority, been looked upon as a rather inhuman oddity,
who wrote well upon a very limited and tributary material.

" It is time this fallacy was dispelled, for Hudson's chief title
to a posthumous fame will rest upon his capacity to express, in a
prose as pellucid as his perception of natural life was clairvoyant,
certain powers of mediation and reconciliation, and yet leave an
impression of wholeness and continuity, as of a full-grown plant
which had flowered and fruited, ripened and cast its seed abroad.
The greatest of these powers is, of course, the union between the
artist and the naturalist, hardly known before his time, since
Gilbert White obviously lacks Hudson's emotional and aesthetic
qualities, while to-day the specialist in the observation of facts is
as remote as he can be from the specialist in the nuances of esoteric
feeling. He enables us to see what he feels and feel what he sees,
and he saw so unerringly because he felt so keenly, and made so
great a naturalist because he was so fine an artist. Knowledge
and sensibility — enemies so old as to seem so by nature — made a
match of it. And this is partly the reason for the obscurity of
Hudson's reputation. . . . Another enchantment was his power
of irrigating his descriptive chronicles of things seen with an
intuitive vein of sheer romancing, which, in his lapses, fell away
into an obstinate, elvish fantasy. Hudson, of course, was a rare
story-teller — El Ombii, An Old Thorn, The Purple Land, A Little
Boy Lost, and even the rather arid Utopian fancy, A Crystal Age,
are testimony enough — but what I mean are his embroideries of
the most scrupulous natural history with little imaginative tales
and fancies and vagaries, which yet throw an oblique light upon
its truths as the fountain-jet of the whitethroat's flight out of
his bush puts a sparkle upon the joyance of Ins song." — H. J.
Massingham in The X at ion and Athenceum.

BOOKS BY W. H. HUDSON

BIRDS OF LA
PLATA

n In Two Volumes. Royal 8vo.

37s. 6d.

With 22 Coloured Plates by H. GRONVOLD

"It is a far cry to the South American pampas, but Birds of
La Plata brings them to the mind's eye —

'Shining, sighing to no shore,'

with all the charm and mystery of the bird life that was once
so abundant there. . . . This wonderful book." — Illustrated
London News.

"Hudson, with vivid, almost affectionate pen, tells us the life-
stories of the birds he knew and loved. . . . The whole book is
a truthful romance." — Manchester Guardian.

"We have no naturalist in England, perhaps have never had
one, who can make birds audible, visible, and palpable on paper
as Mr. Hudson can. His skill in transliterating song is the gift not
so much of literary skill as of an ear peculiarly attuned to the
musical misrule of birds' notes, which follow no laws of harmony,
and often quite defeat people of high musical attainment. . . .
In spite of its staccato form, one chapter after another gives you
the sort of interest that more properly belongs to narrative. You
want to know what is coming next; and that is the most proper
praise for any book. The birds interest you, though most of them
are strangers, and your curiosity is piqued as to what airs and
graces and singings and journeyings and love-makings they will
be up to next. ... It is not that Mr. Hudson goes after strange
occurrences and seeks curiosities of natural history, but that he
observes intimately and has been in touch with fellow-observers."
—Sir William Beach Thomas in The Observer.

7

BOOKS BY W. H. HUDSON

BIRDS IN TOWN
AND VILLAGE

With 8 Coloured Plates after E. J. DETMOLD

Sq. Demy 8vo. ios. 6d. net

"Birds in a Village " only, in Kings' Treasuries, is. gd. net.

"Mr. Hudson loves all birds; they are his work, his
recreation, his life; he writes about them as no one else
can; he sees what others miss." — Manchester Guardian.

"Mr. Hudson is more than a naturalist. He is a man
of genius who transmutes lead into gold — the lead of
knowledge into the gold of feeling. ... As you hear the
music of his prose . . . you recapture the delicious
tenderness of childhood with its wistful wonder and vision.
. . . Mr. Hudson is a nightingale naturalist with a voice
that throbs in waves of magical melody." — James
Douglas in The Star.

LIMITED COLLECTED EDITION

24 Vols. 24 Guineas net the set.

Messrs. J. M. DENT and SONS will gladly
send to any applicant an eight-page Prospectus
with portrait of W. H. Hudson and detailed
list of volumes in the above edition.

ALDINE HOUSE, BEDFORD STREET, W.C.2

PR
6015
U23T3
23

Hudson, Willi a ry

Idle days in Patagonia

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY