FROM THE RIVER PLATE TO THE ANDES
Early in April we made another journey to Buenos Ayres, and thence to
Ensenada, the port of La Plata, where, in the company of friends, I had
to bid good-bye to my wife, with whom the changeful climate had dealt
none too kindly. Just a year before, we had set out to revel in the
sunshine of the golden South, and now one of us, after a year of many
changing weathers, was gladly setting sail for the grey North, resolved
never again to say one word against its climate, while the other would no
less willingly have bid good-bye to the River Plate, but that matters of
importance held him to South America and the promise of many new scenes
and far journeyings for well-nigh another year.
It was with a curious sense of loneliness that I found myself back in
Montevideo, not at our old quarters in the Calle Sarandí, but comfortably
accommodated in the Hotel Oriental, for some three weeks more, ere I too
had to take leave of the River Plate. Those few weeks in that hotel,
which is situated hard by the quay and is the favourite house of call for
all English and American voyagers making a flying visit to the port, went
past much quicker than I had hoped. I found it greatly improved since my
earlier visits, so that it had assumed almost an English aspect in the
matter of appointments, while the _cuisine_ was excellent. The brother
and sister who conduct it showed a very gracious spirit of service to
their guests, and I noticed that in view of the increasing popularity
of their establishment with English-speaking visitors, the lady was
beginning to study their language, of which at that time she knew only
a few words, though she spoke French fluently in addition to her native
tongue.
Many nights of billiard matches at the English Club linger in my memory
of these concluding weeks, and particularly I recall the happy smiling
face of one of the members there, who went about radiating joy because
he had just managed to arrange for leave of absence in October. His
wife—like so many of the wives of the exiles—had been forced to return
home a year or so before that time, and the seven months that now
separated him from wife and home seemed so short by anticipation, in
comparison with the lonely months he had put behind him, that you might
have thought he was setting sail next day. I fear there are many sad
hearts among the British on the River Plate, and many lives being poorly
lived, for one encounters scores of husbands left lonely in these towns
because their wives have found the life so little to their taste, or the
climate, with its sudden changes from hot to cold, too much for their
physical resistance. Can anything be more unsatisfactory than thus to
wear away the best years of one’s life? Several Britishers with whom I
became acquainted, whose duties kept them on the River Plate, had lived
there alone, with only triennial visits to their wives and families in
England, for periods ranging from ten to fifteen years. Some of these
gentlemen had made, or were making, considerable fortunes, but I must
confess I envied none the wealth which they were securing at so great a
sacrifice of domestic happiness.
Still, I would not have you think that my thoughts were tinged with
melancholy when I stepped aboard the old river steamer _Eolo_, on which
so often I had journeyed between the two great cities of the Silver
River, after bidding good-bye to a group of friends, among whom was no
fellow-countryman, to look for the last time on the dancing lights of the
fairy scene which the Bay of Montevideo presents each night to those on
shipboard. In Montevideo our time had passed, on the whole, agreeably;
excepting one tremendous storm of rain and hail, when fiercest thunder
rolled and lightning swept the streets in blinding flashes, it had been
a time of sunshine and fair weather,—sunshine tempered with refreshing
breezes,—so that, after all, we had found something of which we went in
search.
[Illustration: THE NATURAL BRIDGE OF PUENTE DEL INCA, ON THE TRANSANDINE
ROUTE INTO CHILI.]
I remember well how changed was the scene on arriving in the early
morning at Buenos Ayres, where torrential rain was falling. Through the
mud and slush I drove once more to the old, familiar hotel, and nothing
but the most essential duties of the day took me out of doors, for it
rained “as if the heavens had opened and determined to empty themselves
forever,” and next morning I awakened to the rain thundering on the roof
with unabated vigour. So it continued all that day, while I made furtive
dashes here and there, saying a few hurried good-byes, visiting the bank,
arranging travelling accommodation for my journey across the continent
and over the Andes to the city of Santiago de Chili. The train was to
leave about eight o’clock on the Sunday morning, and so admirable is the
accommodation for passengers’ luggage, that if your heavier baggage is
not delivered the previous day, it runs great risk of being left behind
in the morning. This I discovered somewhat late in the evening, and a
hurried packing ensued.
Still in the streaming wet, I saw the last of the sodden city that Sunday
morning, and found myself in a particularly crowded train, with three
travelling companions. One of these was the most talkative and genial of
Argentines I have met, whose family history was speedily at my disposal,
and much of whose companionable character came, I doubt not, from the
French origin to which he confessed. Full of a delightful admiration for
all things English and American, except the language, which he had found
too hard a nut to crack, he proved the best of travelling companions,
having made the journey from Buenos Ayres to Valparaiso many times
before. He was the publicity manager of a very famous Anglo-American firm
of advertising chemists, and I can assure them they are admirably served,
as I found his knowledge of the journalistic conditions of the Argentine
thoroughly sound in every detail on which I was able to test it, and that
meant a very representative test, as it had been an important part of my
own occupation in the country to familiarise myself with journalistic
conditions.
The second of my travelling companions was a typical Argentine of the
town-hating variety. There was nothing of the gaucho in his blood, and
I judged him to be entirely Spanish in origin, of that fair type which
could pass for Anglo-Saxon, but he was a lover of the open spaces and
the wild life of the Camp. Wiry and slim, with blue, inquiring eyes, he
had travelled far, and was familiar with many parts of North America and
Europe, although he had just completed some five years in the wilds of
Paraguay and the Gran Chaco, where I believe the lovers of primitive life
can have more than their fill. He recounted many of his experiences among
the wild Indians of the Chaco, and showed me numerous photographs he had
taken there, with all the pride of a schoolboy. Here was none of your
desperadoes of the wild places, though he carried a big enough Browning
in his belt and the usual long knife of the gaucho in a sheath over his
hip. These accoutrements struck me as strangely unsuited to the man, who,
in general appearance and in the quietness of his demeanour, would have
seemed far more in place perched on a high stool in a counting house.
The third of my companions was a red-headed youth from Christiania, on
his way to Valparaiso, where a fellow Norwegian was managing a successful
business, and had offered him a post. He spoke English well, but Spanish
not at all, and made the most elephantine attempts to pronounce the
simplest words, much to the merriment of our other companions, who had at
first marked him down _un inglés_. It was something of a wonder to us how
he had come so far without mishap, as he showed so little ability to deal
with the ordinary difficulties of travel in foreign lands, and, as the
Franco-Argentine remarked to me, he had _poca cabeza_, or “little head.”
But I suppose there is a special providence that watches over such
travellers as he and brings them safely to their journey’s end.
The rain continued as we sped along through the flat and uninteresting
country. Every road was a running stream, and ditches were swollen into
rivers. Any prospect more dismal or less appealing to the affections
than the Argentine Camp in time of rain, I do not know. And at this time
the rain meant a great drop in the temperature that sent all Nature
a-shivering, so that the dripping herds and the sodden sheep on the
far-reaching pasture lands through which we passed were objects of pity,
while the mud-splashed horses and the dripping drivers were supreme
pictures of wretchedness. From shanties here and there by the railway
side, grey faces peeped out at the train, as one of the events in their
dreary day, and the little country towns were so many houses in seas of
mud. I remember we passed some ostrich farms, and these birds, at no time
suggestive of the life joyous, looked the saddest of bipeds. They are of
a different breed from those that are reared in South Africa to furnish
ladies with their “fine feathers,” and are used for supplying the feather
dusters, or _plumeros_, with which lazy servants throughout the Argentine
flick the dust from furniture to walls and back again from walls to
furniture—an operation of infinite amusement and no utility.
I remember little of our various stopping places, except Junin, the great
railway centre of the Buenos Ayres and Pacific Railway on which we were
travelling, and where are situated its engineering works. The station
was thronged with English people, many of whom had come down to see the
train go through, as that is one of the amusements all along the line,
the young people in the remoter country towns dressing up to promenade
the stations as though these might be pleasure piers. Junin is some four
hours’ run from the capital, and is typical of most Argentine towns, with
its earthen streets which are periodically ploughed and rolled, and so
remain quite passable for a few days after that operation, but for the
rest of the year alternate between the conditions of river-bed and dust
heap.
The little station of “Open Door” I remember. We could see in the
distance the buildings and fields of the great asylum, which I should
very much have liked to visit. This is one of the most remarkable
institutions in the Argentine, for here many hundreds of insane are
employed in all sorts of healthy labour, under the supervision of a
famous alienist, whose methods of treatment are entirely original and
have been the subject of much discussion. I remember reading in the pages
of M. Clemenceau, who wrote a most interesting chapter on his visit to
this great asylum, that the superintendent told him so wonderful were
the results of studying the tastes of the lunatics entrusted to his care
and placing them at congenial occupations, that he often thought he
was the only insane person among all the inhabitants of Open Door. Why
this English name should have been chosen for the place, I do not know,
for surely the association of lunacy and the open door does not seem
particularly desirable.
My Franco-Argentine companion was entirely pleased that the rain
continued, for that meant a more agreeable journey in passing through
the almost desert land across which the railway runs in the heart of the
continent, as in dry weather, and despite closed windows, travellers
become covered with the fine, black dust which blows through every chink
and cranny, making that part of the journey dreaded by all. Even in those
days of rain, there was a slight deposit of grey dust on everything
in our carriage, but I confess to no recollections of discomfort, not
even at meal-times, except that the food set before us was by no means
princely, and the fruit in particular would have been thrown in the
dustbin by an East Side dealer. Vaguely I remember lighted towns and the
darkening night, and then awakening, still in the dark, but with the most
delicious of sweet morning airs penetrating the carriage, as we stood
still in the station of Mendoza.
This would be nearly six of the morning. There was much hurrying of
porters and shifting of luggage from the express into the Transandine
train, waiting on the other side of the platform. In the dining car of
this, coffee was steaming and rolls and butter ready for the travellers.
We speedily secured our seats for the mountain journey on which the
Transandine train had to set out about seven o’clock. And now, in the
grey light, one could see in all directions the dim forms of rugged
hills, and presently the dawn came, swiftly and bright, lighting up
the nearer vine-clad hills, and showing us great dim mountain masses
westward, where the mighty Andes stood between us and the Pacific. It was
a beautiful scene, and thrilled me with that strange feeling which the
hills must ever bring to those who have been born and lived among them,
especially after a year in which I had not set eyes on any rising ground
save the little hummock of the Cerro in the Bay of Montevideo.
The time left to one for a glimpse of the town was of the briefest, and
it was a sleeping town I saw. I had intended to spend two days in Mendoza
on my way into Chili, and made all arrangements accordingly, with the
high approval of the authorities at the Buenos Ayres end. My luggage all
bore large labels for Mendoza, so that by no chance should it be taken
on to Chili while I remained in the Argentine town. In the summer time,
the international trains go three times a week, and in the winter time
but twice. I had positive assurance that the thrice-a-week service was
still running in this first week of May, so that I could spend two days
in Mendoza between trains. In the preceding year, the Transandine Railway
had been closed for four months, owing to the severity of the winter
weather in the mountain passes, and I was anxious that in the event of
the winter of 1913 rivalling that of 1912, I should not be among the
passengers “held up” in these snowy wilds. I felt I was running it quite
closely enough in determining upon a two days’ stay at Mendoza merely
to study the town, and when the guard of the train informed me in the
course of a casual conversation that only two trains a week were running
and I should have to stay four clear days before I picked up the next
connection over the Andes, I forthwith determined to continue my journey,
especially as I had found such agreeable companions.
[Illustration: THE INCA’S LAKE IN THE ANDES, AS I SAW IT.]
[Illustration: THE CHRIST OF THE ANDES.
The great statue erected on the Argentine-Chilian frontier to commemorate
the settlement of the boundary dispute between the two nations. The
Transandine tunnel penetrates the mountain some little distance below
this point.]
But now arose the question of my luggage, which I had so elaborately
marked that it might not by any chance be carried beyond Mendoza.
I sought out the representative of Villalonga, the Pickford of the
Argentine, and explained the situation to him. Looking at my voucher, he
remarked that there was no necessity to make any change, as the luggage,
according to the voucher, was all consigned through to Santiago! The
luggage inspector, with a gang of porters, was employed in shifting the
baggage from the transcontinental train to that which had to climb the
mountains, and he also assured me that it did not matter in the least
where the luggage was labelled for, as it would all go on to Santiago.
And I had been at such pains to provide for its unshipment at Mendoza!
I greatly regretted not being able to linger in this fresh and attractive
town, which, under the bright dawn of that autumn morning, seemed to be a
place where one might have sojourned very pleasantly for a few days. The
streets of the new town, built entirely since the disastrous earthquake
of 1861, are for the most part wide and in fairly good condition, many of
them lined with shady trees and a stream of fresh water running in the
gutters. But I was taking no risks in the upper Andes, as I remembered
the experiences related to me by certain travellers, a year before, who
had been snowbound at Puente del Inca, and reconciled myself to having no
more than a glimpse of Mendoza when it was just turning on its pillow and
thinking of getting up. (I lived to regret this, as several colleagues
joined me in Chili at intervals of months later, and all had good
journeys, the Andes remaining “open” all the winter.)
The sun was radiant when, a little after seven, we steamed out of
Mendoza station and crept in among the verdant foothills of the Andes,
where all around us were signs of vegetation and natural conditions
utterly distinct from those of the Atlantic side. There was a bracing
touch of cold in the morning air, and yet a feeling that here was the
most delightful of climates, with sunny slopes where the grapes ripened
in far-spreading vineyards, the sight of which transported one at once
to the pleasant land of France, and I can imagine that the many French
settlers who have come to Mendoza, attracted by the great and growing
wine trade of the town and district, will often have the illusion that
they are still at home.
The railway, all the way from Mendoza almost to the Pacific, follows
the course of rivers, which at first run eastward from the watershed
of the mountain frontier and then westward to the ocean. The scenery
is by no means sensational in its beauty, as the train threads its way
among the gentler valleys watered by the River Mendoza for some forty
or fifty kilometres westward of the city. But as the ascent becomes
more precipitous and the clatter of the rack and pinion slackens to the
slowest of tunes, while the engine crawls, with much puffing, laboriously
upwards, the panorama of the mountain heights grows very beautiful, and
unlike most mountain scenery of Europe.
Wild and barren are the hills, and lifeless and dead they seem, for
rarely does a bird flit across the scene, and few cattle or sheep find
pasturage after we have passed the junction of the Rivers Mendoza and
Uspallata, between forty and fifty miles westward of Mendoza. There is a
great stillness among these mountains, a feeling of cold and cheerless
solitude. Here we are among the waste places of the earth, and yet they
lack the Dantesque majesty of rugged grandeur and fantastic outline,
having instead a certain rhythmic monotony of form, varied only by their
extraordinary and sensational colouring. Great patches of heliotrope and
purple, long zigzag streaks of green, immense blotches of yellow—vivid
as mustard—bright spots here and there of red and gleaming blue, and
large tracts of oily black—such are the colours I recall among these
gigantic volcanic masses, where an almost endless variety of mineral
substances give these unfamiliar tints to the treeless and grassless
heights. Sometimes, indeed, I found that what looked like a great patch
of sulphur, on nearer approach proved to be a thin yellow grass, upon
which those strange animals, the llamas, are able to feed, and it was, I
think, at the station of Zanjon Amarillo, where we had reached a height
of some 7,350 feet, that I first saw two or three of these quaint beasts
of burden, who stopped cropping this scanty herbage to gaze at the train
with their questioning eyes, in which there is always a suggestion of
indignation.
These wayside stations, of which there are many on the route, are almost
the only signs of habitation, and it is difficult to imagine that
anywhere among those forbidding hills human beings are so luckless as
to have their homes. Everybody at the station seemed to be shivering
with cold, as the bright sunlit sky of the morning was now, in the early
afternoon, glooming over with grey, foreboding a snow-storm, and I
thought I had never seen anything more charged with melancholy than the
little plot of graves beside the station of Zanjon Amarillo. Some dozens
of tiny, wooden crosses and withered wreaths decorated this loneliest of
cemeteries. I suppose most of them who were sleeping their last sleep
alongside this lone little railway station had been employed in the
making of the line, for there is surely naught else but the making and
maintenance of the railway to inhabit these cheerless wastes.
From time to time, of course, little groups of prospectors are wandering
among the mountains, looking for favourable spots where mining may be
attempted, but so far that industry in this region is of the slightest.
We carried with us in our train a number of young Englishmen employed
as sectional superintendents of the line, who had been on a visit to
Buenos Ayres, and at various points they were dropped off, with much
hand-shaking and good wishes, to begin another spell of lonesome, but,
perhaps, not uninteresting work. Their conversation touched the varying
merits of certain distances which ought to be allowed between the
telegraph posts, and it was surprising to learn how greatly opinions
could differ on that subject.
As we approach Punta de las Vacas, a few miles beyond Zanjon Amarillo,
the ascent suddenly stiffens, and the railway now performs the
characteristic corkscrew journey of all Alpine lines. This station is
at the junction of the Cow River (_Rio de las Vacas_) with the Mendoza,
but whence the name of the former I cannot guess, for it seemed a region
where _vacas_ would fare badly. Southward we had now a view of the
volcano Tupungato, but when we had laboriously climbed another twelve
or thirteen miles to Puente del Inca, we were just in time to see, away
to the north, the summit of Aconcagua, the monarch of the Andes, being
blotted out in a snow-storm, which in a few minutes more was upon us,
quickly filling the empty barrows about the station with whitest flakes
and enticing most of the passengers to engage in the primitive pastime of
snow-balling. At this point, 9,000 feet above sea level, where there is
quite a good hotel, with thermal baths that attract many visitors in the
summer time, we find one of the few curiosities of the route, a natural
bridge of volcanic matter, over the stream, but I imagine he was a lonely
Inca who gave his name to it, as this is surely the farthest limit to
which Inca civilisation reached southward from Peru and Bolivia.
The train now continued its journey through a white world, the Andes had
disappeared as if by magic. Snow and white sky everywhere, so that it
strained the eyes to look out of the window, and the increasing cold made
us don our thickest wraps and muffle up, while the rarefied air began
to make breathing somewhat difficult. Along the route it was strange to
pass, every little way, an Indian railway labourer, standing at times on
the very edge of a precipice that swept downwards into the mysterious
white depths beneath, and holding in his hand the spade with which he had
been at work on the approach of the train, or perhaps a signal flag with
which he had indicated that all was clear at some dangerous corner, but
invariably looking entirely resigned to the fate that had cast him thus
to labour for the scantiest fare in these upland wastes, where, by the
railway side, we passed from time to time the rude huts in which the
Indian peones huddled like animals.
I remember that the station at Las Cuevas presented quite a lively scene,
a number of railway engineers and officials, wearing their thick ponchos,
having come out to the verandas of their wooden houses, which stand
back some short distance from the station and are connected therewith
by a wooden bridge. I felt that if one had any particular desire to pit
himself against the primal forces of nature and the rude red life of
savage things, here was the station to get off at, 10,500 feet above sea
level, but I was glad to stay in the train and to pull my travelling rugs
the closer around me as it panted still upward, and presently entered the
famous tunnel which penetrates the summit of the Cordillera Principal,
precisely where the frontier line runs between the Argentine and Chili.
When we emerged on the other side and immediately began to descend,
we had bid good-bye to Argentina, and one of the strangest and most
moving scenes I have ever witnessed presented itself. We came out upon a
colossal amphitheatre, from which, to the northwest, the mountain swept
down from the Inca’s Lake—seen dimly through the driving sleet and snow
on our right—into a white mysterious abyss some two thousand feet below,
where dark objects such as the rocky shoulders of lower hills, seemed to
be floating in an eerie sea of vapour. The snow storm had lessened and
was turning now to rain, but the scene was awesome in its effect upon the
observer descending these uncanny slopes into this vague new land.
And in such fashion, at the sleet-veiled threshold of Chili, I, who
little more than a year before had set out in search of sunshine, must
take leave of my reader.
THE END
FOOTNOTES
[1] British exports to the Argentine in 1912 amounted to $103,555,485,
while United States exports totalled $53,158,179.
[2] From the year 1857 to 1912 inclusive 4,248,355 persons of all
classes entered the Argentine. The nationalities represented were as
follows: Italians, 2,133,508; Spaniards, 1,298,122; French, 206,912;
Russians, 136,659; Syrians, 109,234; Austrians, 80,736; Germans, 55,068;
Britons, 51,660; Swiss, 31,624; Belgians, 22,186; Portuguese, 21,378;
Danes, 7,686; Dutch, 7,120; N. Americans, 5,509; Swedes, 1,702; Others,
79,251. During the year 1912 the total number of newcomers was 323,403,
comprising Italians, 165,662; Spaniards, 80,583; Russians, 20,832;
Syrians, 19,792; Austrians, 6,545; French, 5,180; Portuguese, 4,959;
Germans, 4,337; Britons, 3,134; Danes, 1,316; Swiss, 1,005; N. Americans,
499; Belgians, 405; Dutch, 274; Swedes, 94; Others, 8,786. While the
repatriation of hundreds of thousands would reduce these figures greatly,
the increase by births in the country, which cannot readily be traced,
is an important countervailing item. The Argentine authorities naturally
set great store on this, and even state at times the number of “women of
child-bearing age” entering the country.