ASPECTS OF THE PLAIN
Appearance of a green level land--Cardoon and giant thistles--Villages
of the Vizcacha, a large burrowing rodent--Groves and plantations seen
like islands on the wide level plains--Trees planted by the early
colonists--Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral
people--Houses as part of the landscape--Flesh diet of the gauchos--
Summer change in the aspect of the plain--The water-like mirage--The
giant thistle and a "thistle year"--Fear of fires--An incident at a
fire--The _pampero_, or south-west wind, and the fall of the thistles
--Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals--A great pampero
storm--Big hailstones--Damage caused by hail--Zango, an old horse,
killed--Zango and his master.
As a small boy of six but well able to ride bare-backed at a fast
gallop without falling off, I invite the reader, mounted too, albeit
on nothing but an imaginary animal, to follow me a league or so from
the gate to some spot where the land rises to a couple or three or
four feet above the surrounding level. There, sitting on our horses,
we shall command a wider horizon than even the tallest man would have
standing on his own legs, and in this way get a better idea of the
district in which ten of the most impressionable years of my life,
from five to fifteen, were spent.
We see all round us a flat land, its horizon a perfect ring of misty
blue colour where the crystal-blue dome of the sky rests on the level
green world. Green in late autumn, winter, and spring, or say from
April to November, but not all like a green lawn or field: there were
smooth areas where sheep had pastured, but the surface varied greatly
and was mostly more or less rough. In places the land as far as one
could see was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistles, or wild
artichoke, of a bluish or grey-green colour, while in other places the
giant thistle flourished, a plant with big variegated green and white
leaves, and standing when in flower six to ten feet high.
There were other breaks and roughnesses on that flat green expanse
caused by the _vizcachas,_ a big rodent the size of a hare, a mighty
burrower in the earth. _Vizcachas_ swarmed in all that district where
they have now practically been exterminated, and lived in villages,
called _vizcacheras,_ composed of thirty or forty huge burrows--about
the size of half a dozen badgers' earths grouped together. The earth
thrown out of these diggings formed a mound, and being bare of
vegetation it appeared in the landscape as a clay-coloured spot on the
green surface. Sitting on a horse one could count a score to fifty or
sixty of these mounds or _vizcacheras_ on the surrounding plain.
On all this visible earth there were no fences, and no trees excepting
those which had been planted at the old estancia houses, and these
being far apart the groves and plantations looked like small islands
of trees, or mounds, blue in the distance, on the great plain or
pampa. They were mostly shade trees, the commonest being the Lombardy
poplar, which of all trees is the easiest one to grow in that land.
And these trees at the estancias or cattle-ranches were, at the time I
am writing about, almost invariably aged and in many instances in an
advanced state of decay. It is interesting to know how these old
groves and plantations ever came into existence in a land where at
that time there was practically no tree-planting.
The first colonists who made their homes in this vast vacant space,
called the pampas, came from a land where the people are accustomed to
sit in the shade of trees, where corn and wine and oil are supposed to
be necessaries, and where there is salad in the garden. Naturally they
made gardens and planted trees, both for shade and fruit, wherever
they built themselves a house on the pampas, and no doubt for two or
three generations they tried to live as people live in Spain, in the
rural districts. But now the main business of their lives was cattle-
raising, and as the cattle roamed at will over the vast plains and
were more like wild than domestic animals, it was a life on horseback.
They could no longer dig or plough the earth or protect their crops
from insects and birds and their own animals. They gave up their oil
and wine and bread and lived on flesh alone. They sat in the shade and
ate the fruit of trees planted by their fathers or their great-
grandfathers until the trees died of old age, or were blown down or
killed by the cattle, and there was no more shade and fruit.
It thus came about that the Spanish colonists on the pampas declined
from the state of an agricultural people to that of an exclusively
pastoral and hunting one; and later, when the Spanish yoke, as it was
called, was shaken off, the incessant throat-cutting wars of the
various factions, which were like the wars of "crows and pies," except
that knives were used instead of beaks, confirmed and sunk them deeper
in their wild and barbarous manner of life.
Thus, too, the tree-clumps on the pampas were mostly remains of a
vanished past. To these clumps or plantations we shall return later on
when I come to describe the home life of some of our nearest
neighbours; here the houses only, with or without trees growing about
them, need be mentioned as parts of the landscape. The houses were
always low and scarcely visible at a distance of a mile and a half:
one always had to stoop on entering a door. They were built of burnt
or unburnt brick, more often clay and brushwood, and thatched with
sedges or bulrushes. At some of the better houses there would be a
small garden, a few yards of soil protected in some way from the
poultry and animals, in which a few flowers and herbs were grown,
especially parsley, rue, sage, tansy, and horehound. But there was no
other cultivation attempted, and no vegetables were eaten except
onions and garlic, which were bought at the stores, with bread, rice,
mate tea, oil, vinegar, raisins, cinnamon, pepper, cummin seed, and
whatever else they could afford to season their meat-pies or give a
flavour to the monotonous diet of cow's flesh and mutton and pig.
Almost the only game eaten was ostrich, armadillo, and tinamou (the
partridge of the country), which the boys could catch by snaring or
running them down. Wild duck, plover, and such birds they rarely or
never tasted, as they could not shoot; and as to the big rodent, the
vizcacha, which swarmed everywhere, no gaucho would touch its flesh,
although to my taste it was better than rabbit.
The summer change in the aspect of the plain would begin in November:
the dead dry grass would take on a yellowish-brown colour, the giant
thistle a dark rust brown, and at this season, from November to
February, the grove or plantation at the estancia house, with its deep
fresh unchanging verdure and shade, was a veritable refuge on the vast
flat yellow earth. It was then, when the water-courses were gradually
drying up and the thirsty days coming to flocks and herds, that the
mocking illusion of the mirage was constantly about us. Quite early in
spring, on any warm cloudless day, this water-mirage was visible, and
was like the appearance on a hot summer's day of the atmosphere in
England when the air near the surface becomes visible, when one sees
it dancing before one's eyes, like thin wavering and ascending tongues
of flame--crystal-clear flames mixed with flames of a faint pearly or
silver grey. On the level and hotter pampas this appearance is
intensified, and the faintly visible wavering flames change to an
appearance of lakelets or sheets of water looking as if ruffled by the
wind and shining like molten silver in the sun. The resemblance to
water is increased when there are groves and buildings on the horizon,
which look like dark blue islands or banks in the distance, while the
cattle and horses feeding not far from the spectator appear to be
wading knee or belly deep in the brilliant water.
The aspect of the plain was different in what was called a "thistle
year," when the giant thistles, which usually occupied definite areas
or grew in isolated patches, suddenly sprang up everywhere, and for a
season covered most of the land. In these luxuriant years the plants
grew as thick as sedges and bulrushes in their beds, and were taller
than usual, attaining a height of about ten feet. The wonder was to
see a plant which throws out leaves as large as those of the rhubarb,
with its stems so close together as to be almost touching. Standing
among the thistles in the growing season one could in a sense _hear_
them growing, as the huge leaves freed themselves with a jerk from a
cramped position, producing a crackling sound. It was like the
crackling sound of the furze seed-vessels which one hears in June in
England, only much louder.
To the gaucho who lives half his day on his horse and loves his
freedom as much as a wild bird, a thistle year was a hateful period of
restraint. His small, low-roofed, mud house was then too like a cage
to him, as the tall thistles hemmed it in and shut out the view on all
sides. On his horse he was compelled to keep to the narrow cattle
track and to draw in or draw up his legs to keep them from the long
pricking spines. In those distant primitive days the gaucho if a poor
man was usually shod with nothing but a pair of iron spurs.
By the end of November the thistles would be dead, and their huge
hollow stalks as dry and light as the shaft of a bird's feather--a
feather-shaft twice as big round as a broomstick and six to eight feet
long. The roots were not only dead but turned to dust in the ground,
so that one could push a stalk from its place with one finger, but it
would not fall since it was held up by scores of other sticks all
round it, and these by hundreds more, and the hundreds by thousands
and millions. The thistle dead was just as great a nuisance as the
thistle living, and in this dead dry condition they would sometimes
stand all through December and January when the days were hottest and
the danger of fire was ever present to people's minds. At any moment a
careless spark from a cigarette might kindle a dangerous blaze. At
such times the sight of smoke in the distance would cause every man
who saw it to mount his horse and fly to the danger-spot, where an
attempt would be made to stop the fire by making a broad path in the
thistles some fifty to a hundred yards ahead of it. One way to make
the path was to lasso and kill a few sheep from the nearest flock and
drag them up and down at a gallop through the dense thistles until a
broad space was clear where the flames could be stamped and beaten out
with horse-rugs. But sheep to be used in this way were not always to
be found on the spot, and even when a broad space could be made, if a
hot north wind was blowing it would carry showers of sparks and
burning sticks to the other side and the fire would travel on.
I remember going to one of these big fires when I was about twelve
years old. It broke out a few miles from home and was travelling in
our direction; I saw my father mount and dash off, but it took me half
an hour or more to catch a horse for myself, so that I arrived late on
the scene. A fresh fire had broken out a quarter of a mile in advance
of the main one, where most of the men were fighting the flames; and
to this spot I went first, and found some half a dozen neighbours who
had just arrived on the scene. Before we started operations about
twenty men from the main fire came galloping up to us. They had made
their path, but seeing this new fire so far ahead, had left it in
despair after an hour's hard hot work, and had flown to the new danger
spot. As they came up I looked in wonder at one who rode ahead, a tall
black man in his shirt sleeves who was a stranger to me. "Who is this
black fellow, I wonder?" said I to myself, and just then he shouted to
me in English, "Hullo, my boy, what are you doing here?" It was my
father; an hour's fighting with the flames in a cloud of black ashes
in that burning sun and wind had made him look like a pure-blooded
negro!
During December and January when this desert world of thistles dead
and dry as tinder continued standing, a menace and danger, the one
desire and hope of every one was for the _pampero_--the south-west
wind, which in hot weather is apt to come with startling suddenness,
and to blow with extraordinary violence. And it would come at last,
usually in the afternoon of a close hot day, after the north wind had
been blowing persistently for days with a breath as from a furnace. At
last the hateful wind would drop and a strange gloom that was not from
any cloud would cover the sky; and by and by a cloud would rise, a
dull dark cloud as of a mountain becoming visible on the plain at an
enormous distance. In a little while it would cover half the sky, and
there would be thunder and lightning and a torrent of rain, and at the
same moment the wind would strike and roar in the bent-down trees and
shake the house. And in an hour or two it would perhaps be all over,
and next morning the detested thistles would be gone, or at all events
levelled to the ground.
After such a storm the sense of relief to the horseman, now able to
mount and gallop forth in any direction over the wide plain and see
the earth once more spread out for miles before him, was like that of
a prisoner released from his cell, or of the sick man, when he at
length repairs his vigour lost and breathes and walks again.
To this day it gives me a thrill, or perhaps it would be safer to say
the ghost of a vanished thrill, when I remember the relief it was in
my case, albeit I was never so tied to a horse, so parasitical, as the
gaucho, after one of these great thistle-levelling _pampero_ winds. It
was a rare pleasure to ride out and gallop my horse over wide brown
stretches of level land, to hear his hard hoofs crushing the hollow
desiccated stalks covering the earth in millions like the bones of a
countless host of perished foes. It was a queer kind of joy, a mixed
feeling with a dash of gratified revenge to give it a sharp savour.
After all this abuse of the giant thistle, the _Cardo asnal_ of the
natives and _Carduus mariana_ of the botanists, it may sound odd to
say that a "thistle year" was a blessing in some ways. It was an
anxious year on account of the fear of fire, and a season of great
apprehension too when reports of robberies and other crimes were
abroad in the land, especially for the poor women who were left so
much alone in their low-roofed hovels, shut in by the dense prickly
growth. But a thistle year was called a fat year, since the animals--
cattle, horses, sheep, and even pigs--browsed freely on the huge
leaves and soft sweetish-tasting stems, and were in excellent
condition. The only drawbacks were that the riding-horses lost
strength as they gained in fat, and cow's milk didn't taste nice.
The best and fattest time would come when the hardening plant was no
longer fit to eat and the flowers began to shed their seed. Each
flower, in size like a small coffee-cup, would open out in a white
mass and shed its scores of silvery balls, and these when freed of
heavy seed would float aloft in the wind, and the whole air as far as
one could see would be filled with millions and myriads of floating
balls. The fallen seed was so abundant as to cover the ground under
the dead but still standing plants. It is a long, slender seed, about
the size of a grain of Carolina rice, of a greenish or bluish-grey
colour, spotted with black. The sheep feasted on it, using their
mobile and extensible upper lips like a crumb-brush to gather it into
their mouths. Horses gathered it in the same way, but the cattle were
out of it, either because they could not learn the trick, or because
their lips and tongues cannot be used to gather a crumb-like food.
Pigs, however, flourished on it, and to birds, domestic and wild, it
was even more than to the mammals.
In conclusion of this chapter I will return for a page or two to the
subject of the _pampero_, the south-west wind of the Argentine pampas,
to describe the greatest of all the great _pampero_ storms I have
witnessed. This was when I was in my seventh year.
The wind blowing from this quarter is not like the south-west wind of
the North Atlantic and Britain, a warm wind laden with moisture from
hot tropical seas--that great wind which Joseph Conrad in his _Mirror
of the Sea_ has personified in one of the sublimest passages in recent
literature. It is an excessively violent wind, as all mariners know
who have encountered it on the South Atlantic off the River Plate, but
it is cool and dry, although it frequently comes with great thunder-
clouds and torrents of rain and hail. The rain may last half-an-hour
to half-a-day, but when over the sky is without a vapour and a spell
of fine weather ensues.
It was in sultry summer weather, and towards evening all of us boys
and girls went out for a ramble on the plain, and were about a quarter
of a mile from home when a blackness appeared in the south-west, and
began to cover the sky in that quarter so rapidly that, taking alarm,
we started homewards as fast as we could run. But the stupendous
slaty-black darkness, mixed with yellow clouds of dust, gained on us,
and before we got to the gate the terrified screams of wild birds
reached our ears, and glancing back we saw multitudes of gulls and
plover flying madly before the storm, trying to keep ahead of it. Then
a swarm of big dragon-flies came like a cloud over us, and was gone in
an instant, and just as we reached the gate the first big drops
splashed down in the form of liquid mud. We had hardly got indoors
before the tempest broke in its full fury, a blackness as of night, a
blended uproar of thunder and wind, blinding flashes of lightning, and
torrents of rain. Then as the first thick darkness began to pass away,
we saw that the air was white with falling hailstones of an
extraordinary size and appearance. They were big as fowls' eggs, but
not egg-shaped: they were flat, and about half-an-inch thick, and
being white, looked like little blocks or bricklets made of compressed
snow. The hail continued falling until the earth was white with them,
and in spite of their great size they were driven by the furious wind
into drifts two or three feet deep against the walls of the buildings.
It was evening and growing dark when the storm ended, but the light
next morning revealed the damage we had suffered. Pumpkins, gourds,
and water-melons were cut to pieces, and most of the vegetables,
including the Indian corn, were destroyed. The fruit trees, too, had
suffered greatly. Forty or fifty sheep had been killed outright, and
hundreds more were so much hurt that for days they went limping about
or appeared stupefied from blows on the head. Three of our heifers
were dead, and one horse--an old loved riding-horse with a history,
old Zango--the whole house was in grief at his death! He belonged
originally to a cavalry officer who had an extraordinary affection for
him--a rare thing in a land where horseflesh was too cheap, and men as
a rule careless of their animals and even cruel. The officer had spent
years in the Banda Oriental, in guerilla warfare, and had ridden Zango
in every fight in which he had been engaged. Coming back to Buenos
Ayres he brought the old horse home with him. Two or three years later
he came to my father, whom he had come to know very well, and said he
had been ordered to the upper provinces and was in great trouble about
his horse. He was twenty years old, he said, and no longer fit to be
ridden in a fight; and of all the people he knew there was but one man
in whose care he wished to leave his horse. I know, he said, that if
you will take him and promise to care for him until his old life ends,
he will be safe; and I should be happy about him--as happy as I can be
without the horse I have loved more than any other being on earth. My
father consented, and had kept the old horse for over nine years when
he was killed by the hail. He was a well-shaped dark brown animal,
with long mane and tail, but, as I knew him, always lean and old-
looking, and the chief use he was put to was for the children to take
their first riding-lessons on his back.
My parents had already experienced one great sadness on account of
Zango before his strange death. For years they had looked for a
letter, a message, from the absent officer, and had often pictured his
return and joy at finding alive still and embracing his beloved old
friend again. But he never returned, and no message came and no news
could be heard of him, and it was at last concluded that he had lost
his life in that distant part of the country, where there had been
much fighting.
To return to the hailstones. The greatest destruction had fallen on
the wild birds. Before the storm immense numbers of golden plover had
appeared and were in large flocks on the plain. One of our native boys
rode in and offered to get a sackful of plover for the table, and
getting the sack he took me up on his horse behind him. A mile or so
from home we came upon scores of dead plover lying together where they
had been in close flocks, but my companion would not pick up a dead
bird. There were others running about with one wing broken, and these
he went after, leaving me to hold his horse, and catching them would
wring their necks and drop them in the sack. When he had collected two
or three dozen he remounted and we rode back.
Later that morning we heard of one human being, a boy of six, in one
of our poor neighbours' houses, who had lost his life in a curious
way. He was standing in the middle of the room, gazing out at the
falling hail, when a hailstone, cutting through the thatched roof,
struck him on the head and killed him instantly.