SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND
With a deep blast from her ocean-going whistle the _Asunción_ of the
Mihanovich Line swung out through the shipping of a crowded port and was
off down the Paraguay. The steamer was easily the equal of the best on
the Hudson; its officers and stewards, all argentinos, were as white as
you or I, though the passengers ran to all shades, and it was little
short of startling to see white waiters serving and kowtowing to haughty
Brazilian half-Indians and negroes. Green jungle, occasionally broken by
prairie-like stretches studded with dainty palm-trees, like wheels of
greenery on the ends of broomsticks, sped rapidly past. We stopped at
several towns and _estancias_, now in Brazil, now in Paraguay; here and
there a lone passenger, standing erect in his boat, was rowed out by a
pair of peons, and picked up as we slowed down for a moment. On the
second morning we halted at the estate of an Irishman on Brazilian soil,
the passengers going to inspect a jaguar and a huge wild-cat in
home-made cages, while cow-boys roped a steer and, dragging it down to
the edge of the bank to spare themselves the labor of carrying the
carcass, slaughtered in plain sight of all what was served as beefsteak
that noon and evening. Now and again we put in at a little Paraguayan
town, swarming with barefoot boy-soldiers in faded khaki, with a
reputation for shooting on the slightest provocation. Old women came on
board with bread, watermelons, and clumsy native cigars, scorning
Brazilian money, and demanding the ragged and all but worthless bills of
their own land. Here a new language appeared, the palatal _Guaraní_
sounding on all sides. The evening of the second day brought us to Villa
Concepción, one of the six incorporated “cities” of Paraguay, which
might easily be mistaken for a village. An occasional _estancia_ along
the bank had a little railroad, with screeching toy locomotives and an
electric lighting plant of its own. The Paraguayan _gaucho_, or cow-boy,
had the independent air of men who will not be imposed upon. He wore a
large straw hat, a colored kerchief about his neck, the _chiripá_, huge,
baggy cotton trousers with a puckering-string about his bare ankles as a
protection against the gnats and climbing insects, and in most cases a
blacksmith’s leather apron with a long fringe, a necessity for riders
through the thorny undergrowth. Over this all wore a wide leather belt,
with several buttoned pockets bulging with their probably not great
wealth, and a big knife in a leather scabbard stuck in carelessly
behind, as if ever ready to be drawn on the instant.
On the morning of the fourth day I was awakened by a long blast of the
whistle, and peered out of my hammock to find the steamer anchored among
extensive docks. It was that soft moment of dawn when the sun is just
trembling in stage-fright below the eastern horizon, the lower sky
streaked with delicate colors, the air of that velvety texture known
only at such hours in the tropics. Then the day blazed forth in all its
brilliancy, putting the night breeze to ignominious rout, and disclosing
a low city, its chief square lined by two-story buildings, the largest
of which I recognized, from photographs, as Paraguay’s government
palace. One of a score of hirsute, piratical-looking boatmen, neo-poetic
names painted in gaudy colors on the poops of their crafts, rowed me
ashore with a few strokes, and at the wooden steps of the custom-house
answered my “How much?” with a “What it pleases you, señor.” Either the
boatmen of Asunción are unlike their tribe elsewhere, or my face had
lost that innocent, childlike air of earlier days. I rewarded his
honesty with two Paraguayan dollars,—that is, about eleven cents,—and
marching through my trunk-burdened fellow-passengers, thrust my bundle
toward a pompous cholo in a cream-colored suit. He peered through the
slit in my deerskin kodak-cover, asked a question about the bundled
developing-tank, waved a hand with a regal-toned “Puede retirarse,”
(“You may withdraw yourself”), and I stepped ashore in Asunción del
Paraguay.
The capital of the Inland Republic is its only real city, claiming some
eighty thousand inhabitants, or one tenth the present population of a
land that once, with nearly two millions, ranked with Brazil and the
Argentine as the most important of South America. To-day, thanks to
revolutions; anarchy, Lopez and his French mistress, and the consequent
stagnation, it is in the far background of modern progress. It spreads
over a considerable space of what is really rolling ground—though to one
fresh from nearly two years in the Andes it seemed monotonously flat.
Across the river, on a curve of which it halts abruptly, lies the
sea-flat, trackless _chaco_, the abode of nomadic Indians, dense-blue by
day, and fading to purple under the setting sun. Unfortunately, Francia,
“El Supremo,” dictator for a third of a century, sought to “beautify”
the town by filling its lagoons, straightening its jumble of tortuous
lanes, and reducing it to a featureless similarity to all other capitals
of its kind and size. Travelers of past centuries are agreed that the
chief charm of old Asunción was due to its delightful irregularity.
Certainly its ancient fascination is gone, and to-day it is nothing but
a languid little capital of a stagnant country, the least interesting of
any I had seen in South America.
The time-worn assertion that the population of Paraguay is wholly Indian
in blood is a decided overstatement. In Asunción one sees at least as
many whites as in La Paz. Nor is it true that there are nine women to
every man. True, Francia wiped out the old Spaniards for conspiring
against him; forty years ago, in the days of Lopez, the wars reduced the
proportion to seventeen to one. But time and migrating males have all
but repaired these ravages, though many a man still lives on the
exertions of his harem, one of the several women of which is his legal
wife, and the majority of children born in the country are illegitimate.
In general the place has a different atmosphere, a blasé air little like
the towns of the Andes. Among these less simple people, particularly the
denizens of the “Centro Español,” where I was “put up” during my stay,
one got the feeling that conventionality was not morality; there was
something about their suave, well-bred manners that made one feel that
deep down they were no such sticklers for honesty and justice as for the
urbanities of life. Or would the artificiality of any “civilized” place
have struck a discordant note to one coming suddenly out of a long stay
in the wilderness?
It is in Asunción that the traveler from the north notes the first
advance of the immigration that is to increase to swamping proportions
in the Argentine, as he moves southward. Paraguay is making strenuous,
though not very tactful, efforts to increase immigration, under an
immigration bureau in the hands of a German. Commerce and government are
largely in the hands of foreigners, at least of the second generation,
even the president being a Swiss in blood and name. Paraguay’s
civilization is not strong enough to absorb the newcomers; one hears
German, Italian, or Catalan almost as often as the native Guarani. This
latter is the real speech of the country. Spanish is spoken only in the
cities, and even there the people use among themselves the remnants of
the aboriginal tongue. Teachers in large villages often cannot speak
Castilian; the few Paraguayan countrymen who know it are “afraid” to use
it for fear their fellows will ridicule them for trying to show off.
There has been more than one movement on foot to make Guarani the
official, as well as the actual, language of the country.
The money of Paraguay has fallen to low estate. Step into a bank and
throw down an English sovereign, and there will be thrust upon you some
$90 in native currency, bringing the peso down to little more than the
value of our nickel. Metal money is unknown; the paper bills made in
London and New York are in universal use, the smaller denominations
being ragged and dirty to the point of illegibility, and often patched
with scraps of newspaper. “The nation,” runs the device on these
tattered _billetes_ “recognizes this bill as fifty strong dollars,”
which is quite different from saying it will be redeemed at that rate.
Street-car fares, now 75, had been 67½ centavos, and the company had
found it necessary to print its own change in 2½-centavo pieces,
worth—well, let fractional experts figure it out. Eggs sold in the
market at $7 a dozen; a hair-cut cost $5, and it was not a five-dollar
hair-cut. On the other hand, postage is the cheapest on earth, evidently
because the rates had been established and the stamps printed before the
money depreciated.
After the first investigation I put off replenishing my wardrobe until I
should reach Buenos Aires. It was not merely because the tailor showed
me shoddy stuff and demanded $350 for a suit of it! The local styles
were even more startling than the price mentioned in so offhand a
manner. The trousers demanded by custom, for example, be they made by a
local tailor or imported from Europe, are built up as high as trousers
could by any stretch of the word go; then on top of this comes an
enormous belt-piece, so wide that it requires three buttons to fasten
it, clamping the garment up about the armpits. If only they would use a
couple of inches more, they could button the trousers about the neck,
fasten a collar on them, and dispense with the expense of a shirt
entirely. In the olden days, it is said, the Inca tribes gave the
inhabitants of this region the name of “guara-ni” (breechless ones). The
bloomer-like amplitude of the trousers of the countryman, and the height
of those of his city cousin, suggests that they resent the implied
insult keenly, and have resolved to leave no opportunity for its
repetition. Somewhere around this uncharted expanse of trouser every
one, from merchant to peon, wears a leather belt at least six inches
wide, a combination of coin and revolver carry-all, held together with
several buckles of the size of those on a horse’s saddle-cinch.
The “International” train leaves Asunción every Wednesday and Saturday
morning, and lands the traveler in Montevideo or Buenos Aires fifty
hours later. The through and local fares vary greatly, the former being
subjected to the competition of the river steamers. First and
second-class rates to Buenos Aires are $450 and $325 respectively; local
fares are $680 and $460! Luckily, this is in Paraguayan currency; but
even when turned into real money, it remains a respectable rate. For
half a day we steamed across broad pampas, almost prairies, backed by
wooded ridges, isolated masses of dark rock standing forth here and
there in the middle distance, dim outlines of low mountains hovering on
the horizon. The broad savannas were speckled with cattle, somewhat
gaunt, but of vastly better stock than those of the Andes, a bulky China
bull here and there explaining the improvement.
[Illustration:
A view from the promenade-deck of the steamer of cowboys of Paraguay
slaughtering our day’s beefsteak on the bank of the river]
[Illustration:
A Paraguayan landscape, with native cart, the tall tough grass, and
the _tacurús_, or ant-hills, that abound in this region]
Every man on the train was armed, the weapons varying from flint-lock,
muzzle-loading horse-pistols to the very latest automatic. The revolver
is a sign of caste in Paraguay; my companions accepted me as one of them
only when I had shown my own. When the conductor came through for
tickets, his friends and acquaintances playfully pointed their weapons
at him. The faces of many, even youthful, men were scarred from the
latest revolution, like the battered façades of Asunción. Every native
aboard,—women, children, the train-crew, even the train-guard in his
white uniform and helmet—smoked big, black cigars, which are really
nothing more than the blackened natural leaf rolled up in cigar form.
Brown maidens, physically not unattractive, sat with a half-smoked stogy
in a corner of their mouths, and now and then spat through their teeth
like New York toughs. The cigarette, all but universal elsewhere on my
journey, finds slight favor in Paraguay. At the stations, peons in baggy
_chiripás_ mingled with _estancieros_, their neck-high trousers tucked
into soft leather boots, a silver-headed _rebenque_, or short
riding-whip, hanging from their wrists by a leather thong. Women
squatted on the brick flaggings, selling anything from raw beefsteaks to
the native fire-water. Though there were many stations, the towns were
rarely visible, except a single church-tower marking the site some
distance off. Being built on knolls, the expense of entering them has
been avoided by the railway constructors. The few that were seen were
_triste_ at best, the populations, lolling about the openings that serve
as doors, ragged and ambitionless. At Loque station, women wearing from
ten to fifty coarse straw hats each, languidly offered them for sale. At
Patiño a crude tramway was waiting to carry to the bank of the river the
passengers for San Bernadino, Paraguay’s “watering-place,” on the
beautiful fresh-water lake of Ypacarai. Then came Paraguari, famous for
its revolutions, commercial center of all the old missions for a hundred
miles around, leaf-roofed, two-wheel carts awaiting freight or
passengers. Seventy-five miles from the capital we skirted Villa Rica,
second city of the Inland Republic, with a commerce in tobacco, sugar,
and lumber, but a mere village in all but name.
At the small prairie station of Borja, from which some fellow-countrymen
were constructing a branch line some day to reach the Iguazú Falls, I
abandoned the “International,” and was soon speeding away across the
flat country in a track automobile. At best the Paraguyan landscape is
monotonous, vast plains of reddish soil and coarse grass stretching away
until lost to view, here and there broken by thick clumps of forest.
Ever and again we were slowed down or halted by reddish half-wild cattle
on the unfenced track; the pampa was sprinkled with them as far as the
eye could see. The plains either are, or are fancied to be, of no value
for agriculture, and are left to grazing, while the languid natives,
swinging in their hammocks under their wall-less roofs in the edges of
the forest clumps, raised a bit of corn and tobacco in plantations
hacked out of the woods, and trusted Providence for the rest. Ponderous,
springless, two-wheeled ox-carts that seemed all wheels labored by.
Everywhere the _tacurú_, or cone-shaped ant-hills, stood head-high in
the tall grass. My companions told of _tacurús_ erected during a single
night in the middle of earth-floored dwellings and requiring the
exertions of a band of workmen to dig them out.
At length we drew up before the rough-board headquarters at Charaná. It
being Saturday evening, the entire region, men, women, and children,
proposed to ride into Borja on the work-train, to squander their month’s
wages and remain several days drunk. The young American superintendent,
however, issued orders to the Paraguayan soldiers that had been assigned
him, and though these looked anything but fierce in their ragged khaki
and bare feet, the throng lost no time in obeying their orders to
disembark. For all their childlike demeanor, the soldiers of Paraguay
have a reputation for shooting on scant provocation.
We pushed on along battered old rails, through forest and jungle, with
here and there a bank of red clay, some ten miles to railhead, the line
squirming its way around every knoll, the cheap engines to be employed
requiring that there be nothing steeper than a one percent grade.
Advance gangs had hacked out a cart-road for some distance beyond, where
the territory was growing so dense-wooded and hilly that the
superintendent was considering the use of balloons to survey the
country.
Back at the main camp I had my first _mate_, or “Paraguayan tea.” The
_yerba mate_ is to the life of Paraguay and its adjoining regions what
coca leaves are to the Andes. In the _yerbales_ the leaves and smaller
branches of an evergreen bush not unlike the holly, growing among taller
trees, are spread on a raised platform of poles, smoked and dried,
forced through to the earth floor beneath, beaten almost to a powder
with clubs, and packed in _tercios_ by sewing up green ox-hides, which
shrink until the contents is stone-hard. The gringo engineers had come
to prefer this native beverage to coffee or tea, though they drank it in
cups, with sugar and milk. The native way is to put a spoonful of the
powdered yerba in a little pear-shaped gourd, pour this full of boiling
water, and suck the “tea” through a brass or silver tube, or in the case
of the poorer people, a reed. One spoonful suffices for a score of
persons, the gourd being passed from one to another of a group, each
time being refilled with water, the drinker taking care not to burn
hands or lips on gourd or tube. To any but a foreigner it would be an
insult to offer a separate bowl. The greenish liquid was bitter in taste
and by no means pleasant, but was due in time to become my favorite
beverage, as it does with most gringos who continue the use of it.
Everywhere in this region one runs upon natives loafing in the shade, a
_mate_-gourd, sometimes carved with fantastic figures, grasped in one
hand, lazily imbibing the liquid at regular intervals. Unlike the coca,
it has no narcotic effect; it is, on the contrary, beneficial in
stomachic ailments. The _gaucho_ of the pampas makes it serve as bread
and vegetables in his fixed diet of _asado con cuero_, or beef roasted
in the hide. Many an attempt has been made to introduce _mate_ to the
rest of the world, so far, unfortunately, in vain.
I fell asleep toward dawn on a cot set out in the breeze, to the rattle
of poker-chips, the clinking of bottles and glasses, and cries of “One
hundred dollars!” “Two hundred and fifty!” from the “office” in which
the gringo community had gathered. Next evening a local train set me
down in the heavy darkness at Villa Encarnación, up to a few months
before the halting-place for the night of the “Internacional.” In name
one of the six “cities” of Paraguay, the place was a drowsy, barefoot,
isolated cluster of buildings, rather than a town. Strewn along the side
of a red hill, amid half-luxuriant vegetation, on the banks of the
Paraná, the southern boundary of Paraguay, it covered a considerable
space of rolling, grassy ground, with wide paths of reddish sand where
streets should have been. Its slight commerce was chiefly in the hands
of Germans. It was humid with the rainy season, and insolent with its
big ragged garrison. Green parrots screamed in and out of the
orange-groves, the fruit of which was green in color even when ripe and
of rather acid taste. Across the Paraná, as wide as the Hudson, Posadas,
in the Argentine, lay banked up on the sloping opposite shore, in plain
sight from any part of the town.
Life is free and easy in Paraguay, close to nature. Its women, in their
loose gowns and bare feet, very erect from the practice of carrying
loads on their heads from childhood, have a childlike simplicity, as
well as an extremely graceful carriage. Yet I found this the least
interesting of South American countries. Its old missions, to the ruined
churches of which, overgrown with creepers, a ride of a day or two from
the railroad at almost any point brings one, attract many travelers; but
I had already seen these and better in tropical Bolivia. With its
education at a low ebb, chiefly in the hands of priests to whom sacred
history and catechisms are the sum total of wisdom, the present
inhabitants of Paraguay leave the impression of being incapable of much
advancement.
The change from this languid little country to the live one across the
river was almost startling. When the sun had declined somewhat, a
motor-boat chugged across to Posadas with a score of passengers, where
we landed without ceremony among a group of Argentine officials,
well-dressed and courteously business-like. To those coming upon it from
the direction of Buenos Aires, Posadas may seem small and backward; in
contrast with the drowsy, little grass-grown Paraguayan “city” still in
plain sight across the Paraná, it is very much alive. The capital of the
territory of Misiones, that tongue of land piercing far up between
Brazil and Paraguay and taking its name from the Jesuit establishments
of olden times, it already boasts some ten thousand inhabitants, or more
than the entire territory contained ten years ago. In spite of being
tolerably compact and two-storied in the business section, the town
covers a vast amount of ground, with very wide streets and ample
elbow-room everywhere, except in the clustered shacks of laborers along
the river-brink. A single church, its old red-brick tower still
unfinished, rather Protestant than Catholic in appearance, by reason of
the simplicity of its adornments and the existence of seats within,
takes the place of the score or more that would bulk above a town of
similar size in the Andes. Here were hard-paved streets instead of
sand-holes, steam road-rollers and up-to-date machinery, business
activity and shoes, well-kept parks with plenty of benches, large,
prominent buildings as schools—just opening for the new year in this
first week in March—and well-dressed policemen of manly demeanor. Canvas
cots had taken the place of hammocks. Boys were busy polishing brass
name-plates before important business houses. The red liberty-cap now
adorned all government shields, while the most beautiful flag of South
America, the Argentinian white and sky-blue, flew at the crest of many a
façade. Here a stranger could pass in the streets without being stared
out of countenance. The inhabitants had a look of eagerness and hope in
their faces, signs of at least a material prosperity in striking
contrast to the dreary hopelessness of Andean regions. Yet Posadas is
not forty years old, while Encarnación, across the river, was founded by
the Jesuits more than three centuries ago.
In the second-class car of the N.E.A., the “Nord Este Argentino,” there
were no Indian passengers, and though only a _mixto_, the train made
good progress. At the very first farm outside Posadas an American binder
was felling the autumn grain—and I had not seen so much as a mower since
crossing the Rio Grande thirty months before. At every station were
uniformed police; mounted, officers patroled the country roads. Houses
along the way were not the dens of human animals, but were supplied with
the comforts of home, even American rocking-chairs tucked away in the
shade of their verandas. I had come to the end of the great South
American _monte_ and jungle, and from now on the great Argentine pampas
grew ever broader, slightly rolling here, stretching away to infinity on
each hand. The brick-red soil of Misiones was given over to grazing
rather than to agriculture, though we passed long autumn-dry
corn-fields, the ears broken half off and hanging over to ripen. Cattle
were everywhere, and cow-boys were roping them here and there, while
_gauchos_ careered across the broad plains on their hardy _pintos_. The
railroad and all its appurtenances were just as orderly as they would
have been in England, the railway architecture of which it resembled,
though the cars were of the American style. Everything from engine to
yards was so English one felt sure that, had they spoken their language,
the traincrews would have called the little four-wheeled freight-cars
“goods-vans,” and spoken of “metals” and “sleepers.”
[Illustration:
The mixture of types in the Argentine,—a native _gaucho_ in
_bombachos_ and a Basque immigrant from the Pyrenees]
It was some time after dark that we pulled into Santo Tomé, or at least
into a station bearing that name, and I concluded that I had ridden far
enough for the time being. The train did not enter the town, perhaps
because it would have been hard to decide just where the town was. In
the Argentine these are scattered over a vast amount of ground, in
striking contrast to the heaped-up crowding common to the Andes. A
half-moon dim-lighted the flat country far and wide. I set out in the
moonlight along a broad highway, and wandered until any hope of finding
a town died out; then ran upon a few low, scattered houses that
suggested some insignificant village, like Bolivia’s tropical “cities”;
then I went on and on until there grew up about me an immense town,
never crowded together, yet with an enormous plaza, long stretches of
electric arc-lamps, a checkerboard city of wide streets and long blocks,
each house set in its own big garden, a town well-to-do, citified, with
many automobiles, and but a single church, of moderate size and
inconspicuous.
Life began to renew about the station at 3 A.M. The restaurant opened,
watchmen lighted big gasoline arc-lamps, the “International” rolled in,
and we were off again, with ample room even in the second-class car.
Three hours later I sat up to watch the sun rise red out of Uruguay,
across the river. About the vast, long-haired, unkempt plains stood
clumps of pampa trees; at the towns were many gay with blossoms—spring
blossoms, I had almost written, until I remembered it was autumn. The
_aloncita_, a bird not unlike a small robin in appearance, though with
less red, began to build its beehive-shaped mud nest on the wooden
cross-pieces of the telegraph-poles. All day long, for hundreds of
miles, there was an average of a nest on every third pole, always on the
side farthest from the railroad, as if the noise of the trains were
annoying to its inhabitants, the arched doorway always toward the
direction from which we came—the north—to catch, perhaps, the warmer
breezes. Among hundreds of nests I saw only three or four exceptions to
this, and all day long only one built anywhere else than on the
cross-piece, close against the pole. One daring architect had set his on
the top of the pole itself, neatly capping it. As this particular pole
had its cross-piece already occupied, it looked as if the bird above was
a hard-headed fellow who had failed to stake his claim in time, but who
insisted, nevertheless, on living in that particular spot.
The country grew more and more like our own, in climate, creature
comforts, news-stands, block-signals, uniformed mailmen, carts and
wagons, some of them of the boat-shaped style of Poland, rattling past
on broad highways, busy towns along the way, at only the more important
of which the train halted briefly, and between them raced swiftly and
smoothly southward. Through the windows the horizon of the great rolling
pampa continually rose and fell. Sometimes it was punctuated with a
grove of trees, more rarely with a small forest, the chiefly unfenced
plains everywhere sprinkled with cattle. Here and there a _ñandu_, the
South American ostrich, trotted awkwardly away across the prairie. Where
there were fences, the wires ran through the posts by holes bored in
them, rather than being secured by staples. Well-tended fields of
fruit-trees in long rows seemed incongruous in South America; it brought
a feeling of satisfaction to see industry and decent living again,
things being done, instead of merely doing themselves. Some industrious
country boys climbed a fence with bags of large, juicy watermelons for
sale; boys merely in quest of pocket-money and not because their
livelihood depended upon it. The population at large was too busy to
bother with station hawking. Countrymen wore _bombachos_, enormous
bloomer-like trousers, tucked into soft top-boots or drawn up about the
bare ankles above their _alpargatas_, or hempen soles, as if the cost of
cloth were of no importance. Any lady would have remained ladylike in
them. Now and then the river drew up so close beside us that we could
look far off across Uruguay, spread out on the other side.
At length we sighted ahead, a sort of oriental mist hovering about it, a
whitish city with a two-tower church suggesting minarets, a city set on
a knoll, not unlike Jerusalem. Yet this was not the town we were
approaching, but Salto, in the “República Oriental” over the river.
Great fields of grapes, well tended, began to race by us, suburban
houses thickened, and we drew up at the in-all-respects-complete city of
Concordia, four hundred miles south of Posadas on the frontier I had
left twenty-four hours before. In the Andes, world-famous cities had
been mere languid villages; in the Argentine, places the world at large
had never heard of were large, flourishing metropolises. Concordia
numbers twenty thousand inhabitants, virtually all white and all alive.
Yet it is not even the capital, but merely the second city of the
Province of the Entre Rios—“Between the Rivers” Paraná and Uruguay,
famous for its _saladerías_, or beef-salting establishments. Well spread
out, it has few churches and no over-supply of priests, the former with
few bells and those of agreeable tone, which are _rung_, not too often,
instead of being beaten with an infernal din. Liquor-shops are few; the
majority of the population finds something more worth while than
shopkeeping. Its inhabitants know how to pass two abreast on the
sidewalks; women on bicycles bring a frequent start of surprise; swarms
of cleanly dressed boys and girls sally forth from big, well-equipped
schools, where coeducation reigns; bootblacks clad like business men and
carrying upholstered and decorated seats seek their clients in the
well-kept streets and plazas; electric street-cars give excellent
service. Electric lights both in streets and houses were even more
brilliant than our own; the public library was actually open and
“functioning,” and did hot spend its time staring at the foreigner who
had come to read. In the “Hotel Garabaldi”—just such a place as the name
implies—wine was served with meals as freely as in Europe, and though
only the abode of workingmen, it was superior to the best hostelry of
Andean cities. Real beds had now taken the place of canvas cots; at the
rear was an electric-lighted _cancha de bochas_, or outdoor bowling
alley for the clientèle of Italian workmen.
I slipped across the river next afternoon to Salto, in Uruguay, adding
another country to my growing collection. One went and came freely;
without frontier formalities. Salto is large, and several times older
than Concordia, with many well-built buildings, yet with a suggestion of
“seediness,” a bit more squalor and barefootedness, its church not so
imposing and well-kept as it looks at a distance, its policemen in
rather shiny and threadbare uniforms, its streets cobbled, rather than
smoothly paved. In short, it is more Spanish in type, more clustered
together, with a general air suggesting that this is not quite so live
and hopeful a country as that over the river. Many proud old families
live here; yet the head of more than one of them slips across daily to
do business in the Argentine.
One can go on from Concordia to Buenos Aires by rail, but I chose to
take the overnight journey on a big Mihanovich river-steamer, with all
the conveniences of an ocean liner. The flat, sometimes rolling,
occasionally bushy shores of the Uruguay were broken by several towns,
notably the two model establishments producing Leibig’s extract of beef.
When I returned on deck next morning a brilliant sun was pouring its
rays blindingly over the stream misnamed the Plata, the “River of
Silver,” by Sebastian “Gaboto”—who was none other than our own Sebastian
Cabot—because he fancied it ran uphill to the silver mines of Peru. The
Indians called it the Paraná-Guazú, the “River Large as a Sea,” a truer
name, for on the right it stretched away to the dimmest of broken land
forms, and soon these, too, disappeared, and a reddish-brown sea spread
unbroken to the horizon. For a time we hugged the Uruguayan shore, then
swung the blazing sun around behind us and struck out for what, but for
its color, might have been the open sea. Soon we began to pass buoys of
the Argentine government, marked “R. A. m. o. p.,” with the kilometers
to the end of my journey painted upon them. Toward eight, where the
yellow sea and the bluish-gray sky met, the vast, perfect circle of the
horizon was broken by a patch of faint white. It was only a tiny narrow
line down at the extreme edge of the great inverted bowl of sky above
us, yet so long—several inches, in fact—that should it turn out to be a
city, as I began to suspect, since we were headed directly for it, it
would be a large one indeed. Then the white patch began to take on faint
individual shape, and above us the wireless was spitting its message to
the yet invisible world ahead. An hour later we were in the midst of
buoys, large and small, marking the “Canal Sur,” or South Channel. Boats
and steamers appeared, and sailing vessels spread their white wings
across the yellow waters on all sides of us, while the city stretched
along the horizon ahead had turned from white to gray, with a tint of
red, neither color nor edifice conspicuous, except for two groups of
huge brick smoke-stacks belching forth into the brilliant sky. Even
after the long line of buildings had taken on definite form, and one
could all but count their windows, the city seemed still to sit on the
yellow sea. One was struck, too, by the narrowness of the strip; the
buildings seemed for the most part a bare four stories, with only here
and there one as high as ten cutting into the landless sky-line. Two
tugs took possession of us, dragging us up a narrow channel through a
wilderness of shipping, where we must soon stop for lack of space, until
we spied an unoccupied bit of wharf and warped gradually into it. It was
a late-summer morning, the ninth of March. While the rest waited for
their baggage to be examined, an official glanced at my bundle, jerked a
thumb scornfully over a shoulder, and I stepped out into the
metropolitan rumble of—no wonder gringo residents have abbreviated it to
“B.A.”—“la Ciudad y Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires.”
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Transcriber’s note:
1. Changed “I am not of that kidney” to “I am not of that kind” on p.
48.
2. Changed “going a journey” to “going on a journey” on p. 167.
3. Silently corrected typographical errors.
4. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.