Chapter II: Part 2

For about ten leagues in circumference the plain stretched out, walled in with woods, which here and there jutted out into it, forming islands and peninsulas. The flat-roofed town straggled along three flat and sandy streets; the little plaza, planted with mameyes and paraiso trees, served as a lounging-place by day, by night a caravanserai for negroes; in time of rain the streets were turned to streams, and poured their water into the plaza, which became a lake. At the west corner of the square was situated Cardozo’s store, the chief emporium, mart, and meeting-place (after the barber’s and the chemist’s) of the whole town. Two languid and yellow, hermaphroditic young Brazilians dressed in alpaca coats, white trousers, and patent leather boots dispensed the wares, whilst negroes ran about rolling in casks of flour, hogsheads of sugar, and bales of black tobacco from Bahia, or from Maranhão. Such exterior graces did the little town of the High Cross exhibit to us, wearied with the baking days and freezing nights of the last month’s campaign. Whether some Jesuit in the days gone by, when missionaries stood up before their catechumens unsustained by Gatling guns, sheltered but by a rude cross in their hands and their meek lives, had named the place, in commemoration of some saving act of grace done by Jehovah in the conversion of the heathen, none can tell. It may be that the Rood set up on high was but a landmark, or again to mark a frontier line against the heathen to the north, or yet it may have been the grave of some Paulista, who in his foray against the Jesuits in Paraguay died here on his return, whilst driving on before him a herd of converts to become slaves in far San Paulo, to the greater glory of the Lord. All these things may have been, or none of them; but the quiet sleepy place, the forests with their parrots and macaws, their herds of peccaries, their bands of screaming monkeys, the bright-striped tiger-cats, the armadillos, coatis, capibarás, and gorgeous flaming “seibos,” all intertwined by ropes of living cordage of lianas, and the supreme content of all the dwellers in the district, with God, themselves, their country, and their lives, still after twenty years is fresh, and stirs me, as the memory of the Pacific stirs a reclaimed “beach-comber” over his grog, and makes him say, “I never should have left them islands, for a man was happy in ’em, living on the beach.”

To this commercial centre (centro do commercio) we were advised to go, and there I rode, leaving my partner with the peons riding round the caballada upon the plains. Dressed as I was in the clothes worn by the Gauchos of the Banda Oriental, a hat tied underneath the chin with a black cord, a vicuña poncho, and armed with large resounding silver spurs, I made a blot of colour in Cardozo’s shop amongst the quietly dressed Brazilians, who, though they were some of the smartest men in South America upon a horse, were always clad in sober-coloured raiment, wore ordinary store-cut trousers, and had their feet endued with all the graces of a five-dollar elastic-sided boot.

Half-an-hour’s talk with the chief partner shattered all our plans. It then appeared that to take horses on to Rio was impossible, the country, after San Paulo, being one dense forest, and even if the horses stood the change of climate, the trip would take a year, thus running off with any profit which we might expect. Moreover, it appeared that mules were in demand throughout Brazil, but horses, till past San Paulo, five hundred miles ahead, but little valued, and almost as cheap, though much inferior in breed to those bred on the plains of Uruguay. He further told us to lose not a day in teaching all the horses to eat salt, for without that they would not live a month, as once the range of mountains passed between Cruz Alta and the plains, no horse or mule could live without its three months’ ration of rock-salt; there being in the pasture some malign quality which salt alone could cure. Naturally he had the cheapest salt in the whole town, and as our horses were by this time so thin that it was quite impossible to take them further without rest, they having been a month upon the road, we set about to find an enclosed pasture where we could let them feed.

Xavier Fernandez, a retired slave- and mule-dealer, was the man on whom by accident we fell. Riding about the plain disconsolately, like Arabs changing their pastures, and with our horses feeding near a little pond, we met him. An old straw hat, bed-ticking trousers, and with his naked feet shoved into slippers of carpindo leather, and an iron spur attached to one of them and hanging down at least an inch below his heel, mounted upon a mule saddled with the iron-framed Brazilian saddle, with the addition of a crupper, a thing strange to our eyes, accustomed to the wild horses of the plains, he did not look the type of “landed gentleman,” but such he was, owner of flocks and herds, and, in particular, of a well-fenced pasture, enclosing about two leagues of land.

After much talk of things in general, of politics, and of the revolution in progress in the republic we had left, upon our folly in bringing horses, which could go no further into the interior, and of the money we should have made had we brought “bestas,” that is, mules, we agreed to pay him so much a month for the use of his fenced pasture, and for our maintenance during the time we stayed. Leaving the horses feeding, watched by the men, we rode to see the place. Upon the way Xavier imparted much of history, a good deal of his lore, and curious local information about Cruz Alta, duly distorted, as befits a reputable man, through the perspective of his predilections, politics, faith, opinions, and general view of life.

We learned that once Cruz Alta was a most important place, that six-and-thirty thousand mules used to be wintered there, and then in spring moved on to the great fair at Surucuba in the Sertão, that is the forest district of San Paulo, and then sold to the merchants from the upper districts of Brazil. But of late years the number had been much reduced, and then stood at about twelve thousand. This he set down to the accursed steamboats which took them up the coast, to the continual fighting in the state of Uruguay, and generally to the degeneration which he thought he saw in man. In the heyday of the prosperity of the place “gold flowed from every hand,” so much so, that even “as mulheres da vida” kept their accounts in ounces; but now money was scarce, and business done in general by barter, coin being hardly even seen except for mules, for which it was imperative, as no one parted with “bestas” except for money down. Passing a little wood we saw a row of stakes driven into the ground, and he informed us that they were evidently left by some Birivas, that is people from San Paulo, after having used them to secure their mules whilst saddling. The Paulistas, we then learned, used the “sirigote,” that is, the old-fashioned high-peaked saddle brought from Portugal in times gone by, and not the “recado,” the saddle of the Gauchos, which is flat, and suited better for galloping upon a plain than for long marches over mountain passes and through woods. All the points, qualities, with the shortcomings and the failings of a mule, he did rehearse. It then appeared a mule should be mouse-coloured, for the red-coloured mule is of no use, the grey soft-footed, and the black bad-tempered, the piebald fit “for a German,” which kind of folk he held in abhorrence mixed with contempt, saying they whined in speaking as it had been the whining of an armadillo or a sloth. The perfect mule should be large-headed, not with a little-hammer head like to a horse, but long and thin, with ears erect, round feet, and upon no account when spurred ought it to whisk its tail, for that was most unseemly, fit but for Germans, Negroes, Indians, and generally for all those he counted senseless people—“gente sem razão”; saying “of course all men are of one flesh, but some are dog’s flesh, and let them ride mules who whisk about their tails like cattle in a marsh.” Beguiled by these, and other stories, we soon reached the gate of the enclosure, and he, dismounting, drew a key from one of the pockets of his belt and let us in. A short half-hour brought us up to his house, passing through ground all overgrown with miamia and other shrubs which did not promise to afford much pasturage; but he informed us that we must not expect the grasses of the plains up at Cruz Alta, and thus conversing we arrived before his house.

Surrounded by a fence enclosing about an acre, the house stood just on the edge of a thick wood. On one side were the corrals for horses and for cattle, and on the other the quarters of the slaves. In shape the houses resembled a flattish haystack thatched with reeds, and with a verandah rising round it, supported on strong posts. At either end a kind of baldachino, one used as a stable and the other as a kitchen, and in the latter a fire continually alight, and squatted by it night and day a negress, either baking flat, thin girdle-cakes made of maize, shaking the flour out of her hand upon an iron plate, or else filling a gourd of maté with hot water, and running to and fro into the house to give it to her mistress, never apparently thinking it worth while to take the kettle with her into the house.

The family, not quite so white as Xavier himself, consisted of a mother always in slippers, dressed in a skirt and shift, which latter garment always seemed about to fall down to her waist, and two thin, large-eyed, yellowish girls arrayed in vestments like a pillow-case, with a string fastening them at the narrowest place. Slave girls of several hues did nothing and chattered volubly, and their mistress had to stand over them, a slipper in her hand, when maize was pounded in a rough mortar hewn from a solid log, in which the slaves hammered with pestles, one down, the other up, after the fashion of blacksmiths making a horsehoe, but with groans, and making believe to be extenuated after three minutes’ work, and stopping instantly the moment that their mistress went into the house to light her cigarette.

An official in Cruz Alta, known as the Capitão do Matto, holding a status between a gamekeeper and a parish clerk, kept by the virtue of his office a whipping-house, to which recalcitrant or idle slaves were theoretically sent; but in the house of Xavier at least no one took interest enough in anything, except Xavier himself, to take the trouble; and the slaves ruled the female part of the establishment, if not exactly with a rod of iron, still to their perfect satisfaction, cooking and sewing now and then; sweeping, but fitfully; and washing when they wanted to look smart and figure at a dance. The Capitão do Matto was supposed to bring back runaways and keep a leash of bloodhounds, but in the memory of man no one had seen him sally forth, and for the blood-hounds, they were long dead, although he drew regular rations for their maintenance. In the interior of Brazil his office was no sinecure, but in Cruz Alta horses were plentiful, the country relatively easy, and slaves who ran away, which happened seldom, timed their escape so as to put a good day’s journey between them and any possible pursuit, and on the evening of the fifth day, if all went well, they got across the frontier into Uruguay.

Terms once arranged, we let our horses loose, laid out rock-salt in lumps, first catching several of the tamest horses, and forcing pieces into their mouths; they taught the others, and we had nothing more to do. We paid our peons off, got our clothes washed, rested, and then found time at first hang heavy on our hands. Hearing an Englishman lived about ten leagues off, we saddled up and rode to visit him. After losing ourselves in a thick forest of some kind of pine, we reached his house, but the _soi-disant_ Briton was from Amsterdam, could speak no English, was a little drunk, but asked us to get off and dine with him. During the dinner, which we had all alone, his wife and daughter standing looking at us (he too drunk to eat), pigs ran into the room, a half-grown tapir lay in a corner, and two new-caught macaws screamed horribly, so that, the banquet over, we did not stay, but thanked him in Portuguese, which he spoke badly, and rode off home, determining to sleep at the first wood, rather than face a night in such a place.

The evening caught us near to a forest, the trail, sandy and white, running close to a sort of cove formed in the trees, and here we camped, taking our saddles off, lighting a fire, and lying down to sleep just in the opening of the cove, our horses tied inside. All through the night people appeared to pass along the road. I lay awake half-dozing now and then, and watched the bats, looked at the fire-flies flitting about the trees, heard the harsh howling of the monkeys, the tapirs stamp, the splash made by the lobos and carpinchos as they dashed into the stream, and then slept soundly, and awoke to find one of the horses gone. The moon shone brightly, and, waking up my friend, I told him of our loss. We knew the horse must have a rope attached to him, and that he probably would try to get back to Cruz Alta, along the road we came. My horse was difficult to bit, but by the aid of tying up one foot, and covering his eyes up with a handkerchief, we bitted him, then mounted both of us upon his back, hiding the other saddle behind some grass, and started on the road. The sandy trail was full of horses’ tracks, so that we could do nothing but ride on, hoping to catch him feeding by the way. About a league we rode, and then, not seeing him, turned slowly back to get the other saddle, make some coffee, and start home when it was light. To our astonishment, upon arriving at the cove, the other horse was there, and neighing wildly, straining on his rope, and it appeared that he had never gone, but being tied close to the wood had wandered in, and we, thinking he must have gone, being half-dazed with sleep, had never thought of looking at his rope.

Defrauded, so to speak, out of our Englishman, and finding that the horses, after the long journey and the change of water and of grass, daily grew thinner, making it quite impossible to move them, forwards or back, and after having vainly tried to sell them, change them for mules, or sugar, quite without success, no one except some “fazendero” here and there caring for horses in a land where every one rode mules, we settled down to loaf. Once certain we had lost our money and our pains, nothing remained but to wait patiently until the horses got into sufficient state to sell, for all assured us that every day we went further into the interior, they would lose flesh, that we should have them bitten by snakes in the forests, and arrive at Rio, if we ever got there, either on foot, or with but the horses which we rode.

For a short time we had almost determined to push on, even if we arrived at Rio with but a horse apiece. Then came reflection, that reflection which has dressed the world in drab, made cowards of so many heroes, lost so many generous impulses, spoiled so many poems, and which mankind has therefore made a god of, and we decided to remain. Then did Cruz Alta put on a new look. We saw the wondrous vegetation of the woods, felt the full charm of the old-world quiet life, watched the strange multi-coloured insects, lay by the streams to mark the birds, listened for the howlings of the monkeys when night fell; picked the strange flowers, admired the butterflies floating like little blue and yellow albatrosses, their wings opened and poised in the still air, or wondered when a topaz-coloured humming-bird, a red macaw, an orange-and-black toucan, or a red-crested cardinal flitted across our path. Inside the wood behind the house were clearings, made partly by the axe and partly by fire, amongst the tall morosimos, coronillos, and palo santos, and in the clearings known as “roças” grew beans and maize, with mandioca and occasionally barley, and round them ran a prickly hedge either of cactuses or thorny bush, cut down to keep out tapirs and deer, and usually in a straw hut a negro lay, armed with a flint-lock gun to fire at parrots, scare off monkeys, and generally to act as guardian of the place. Orange and lemon trees, with citrons and sweet limes, grew plentifully, and had run wild amongst the woods; bananas were planted in the roça; but what we liked the best was a wild fruit called Guavirami, which grew in patches on the open camp, yellow and round, about the size of a small plum, low-growing, having three or four small stones, cold as an icicle to taste upon the hottest day. A little river ran through the middle of the wood, and in a stream a curious machine was placed for pounding maize, driven by water-power, and unlike any contrivance of a similar nature I had ever seen before. An upright block of wood, burned from the centre of a tree, stood in the stream, hollowed out in the centre to contain the maize; water ran up a little channel, and released a pestle, which fell with a heavy thud upon the corn, with the result that if one left a basket full in the great mortar over-night, by morning it was pounded, saving that labour which God Himself seems to have thought not so ennobling after all, as He first instituted it to carry out a curse.

So one day told, and may, for all I know, have certified another, but we recked little of them, riding into Cruz Alta now and then and eating cakes at the confectioner’s, drinking innumerable glasses of sweet Malaga, laying in stores of cigarettes, frequenting all the dances far and near, joining in cattle-markings, races, and anything in short which happened in the place.

Perhaps our greatest friend was one Luis, a slave, born in Angola, brought over quite “Bozal” (or muzzled, as the Brazilians say of negroes who can speak no Portuguese), then by degrees became “ladino,” was baptized, bought by our host Xavier, and had remained with him all the remainder of his life. Black, and not comely in the least, bowlegged from constant riding, nose flat, and ears like flappers, a row of teeth almost as strong as a young shark’s, flat feet, and crisp Angola wool which grew so thickly on his head that had you thrown a pin on it, it could not have reached the skin, he yet was honest and faithful to the verge of folly; but then, if heaven there be, it can be but inhabited by fools, for wise men, prudent folk, and those who thrive, have their reward like singers, quickly, and can look for nothing more. He spoke about himself half-pityingly under the style of “Luis o Captivo,” was pious, fervent in sacred song, instant in prayer (especially if work was to be done), not idle either, superstitious and affectionate with all the virtues of the most excellent Saint Bernard or Newfoundland dog, and with but little of the imperfections of a man except the power of speech. Often he had been with his master into Uruguay to purchase cattle, or to buy mules for the Brazilian market, and when I asked him if he did not know that he was free the instant that he stepped in Uruguay, said: “Yes, but here I was brought up when I first came from Africa; they have been kind to me, it is to me as the querencia {46} is to a horse, and were it not for that, small fear I should return, to remain here ‘feito captivo’; but then I love the place, and, as you know, ‘the mangy calf lived all the winter, and then died in the spring.’” He held the Christian faith in its entirety, doubting no dogma, being pleased with every saint, but yet still hankered after fetish, which he remembered as a child, and seemed to think not incompatible with Christianity, as rendering it more animistic and familiar, smoothing away its angularities, blotting whatever share of reason it may have away, and, above all, giving more scope, if possible, to faith, and thereby opening a larger field of possibilities to the believer’s mind.

So Luis with others of his kind, as Jango, Jico, and Manduco, became our friends, looking upon us with that respect mixed with contempt which is the attitude of those who see that you possess the mysterious arts of reading and of writing, but cannot see a horse’s footprint on hard ground; or if you lose yourself, have to avail yourself of what Luis referred to as “the one-handed watch the sailors use, which points the way to go.”

Much did Xavier talk of the Indians of the woods, the “Bugres,” as the Brazilians call them; about the “Botocudos,” who wear a plug stuck in their lower lip, and shape their ears with heavy weights in youth, so that they hang upon their shoulders; and much about those “Infidel” who through a blowpipe direct a little arrow at the travelling “Christians” in the woods, whose smallest touch is death. It then appeared his father (fica agora na gloria) was a patriot, that is, ’twas he who extirpated the last of all the “Infidel” from the forests where they lived. Most graphically did he tell how the last Indians were hunted down with dogs, and in a pantomime he showed how they jumped up and fell when they received the shot, and putting out his tongue and writhing hideously, he imitated how they wriggled on the ground, explaining that they were worse to kill than is a tapir, and put his father and the other patriots to much unnecessary pain. And as he talked, the woods, the fields, the river and the plain bathed in the sun, which unlike that of Africa does not seem weary of its task, but shines unwearied, looking as it does on a new world and life, shimmered and blazed, great lizards drank its rays flattening themselves upon the stones in ecstasy, humming-birds quivered at the heart of every flower; above the stream the dragon-flies hung poised; only some “Infidel” whom the patriots had destroyed seemed wanting, and the landscape looked incomplete without a knot of them in their high feather crowns stealthily stealing round a corner of the woods.

In the uncomprehended future, incomprehensible and strange, and harder far to guess at than the remotest semi-comprehended past, surely the Spanish travellers and their writings will have a value quite apart from that of any other books. For then the world will hold no “Bugres”; not a “Botocudo” will be left, and those few Indian and Negro tribes who yet persist will be but mere travesties of the whites: their customs lost, their lore, such as it was, despised; and we have proved ourselves wiser than the Creator, who wasted so much time creating beings whom we judged unfit to live, and then, in mercy to ourselves and Him, destroyed, so that no evidence of His miscalculated plan should last to shame Him when He thought of His mistake. So to this end (unknowingly) the missionary works, and all the Jesuits, those who from Paraguay through the Chiquitos, and across the Uruguay, in the dark Moxos, and in the forests of the Andes, gave their lives to bring as they thought life everlasting to the Indians—all were fools. Better by far instead of Bibles, lives of saints, water of baptism, crucifixes, and all the tackle of their trade, that they had brought swords, lances, and a good cross-bow each, and gone to work in the true scientific way, and recognized that the right way with savages is to preach heaven to them and then despatch them to it, for it is barbarous to keep them standing waiting as it were, just at the portals of eternal bliss.

And as we lingered at Cruz Alta, Christmas drew near, and all the people began to make “pesebres,” with ox and ass, the three wise men, the star of Bethlehem, the Redeemer (not of the Botocudos and the Bugres) swaddled and laid in straw. Herdsmen and negroes dismounted at the door, fastened their half-wild mules or horses carefully to posts, removed their hats, drawing them down over their faces furtively, and then walked in on tiptoe, their heavy iron spurs clanking upon the ground, to see the Wondrous Child. They lounged about the room, speaking in whispers as he might awake, and then departed silently, murmuring that it was “fermosisimo,” and getting on their horses noiselessly were gone, and in a minute disappeared upon the plain. Then came the Novena with prayer and carols, the prayers read by Xavier himself out of a tattered book, all the assembled family joining with unction in the responses, and beating on their breasts. Luis and all the slaves joined in the carols lustily, especially in one sung in a minor key long-drawn-out as a sailor’s shanty, or a forebitter sung in a calm whilst waiting for a breeze. After each verse there was a kind of chorus calling upon the sinner to repent, bidding him have no fear but still hold on, and thus exhorting him—

“Chegai, Chegai, pecador, áo pe da cruz
Fica nosso Senhor.”

Christmas Day found us all at mass in the little church, horses and mules being tied outside the door to the trees in the plaza, and some left hobbled, and all waiting as if St. Hubert was about to issue forth and bless them.

Painfully and long, the preacher dwelt upon the glorious day, the country people listening as it were new to them, and as if all the events had happened on the plain hard by. In the evening rockets announced the joyful news, and the stars shone out over the woods and plains as on the evening when the bright particular star guided the three sheikhs to some such place as was the rancho of our host.

Christmas rejoicings over, a month sped past and found us still, so to speak, wind-bound in the little town. No one would buy our horses, some of which died bitten by snakes. It was impossible to think of going on, and to return equally difficult, so that there seemed a probability of being obliged to pass a lifetime in the place. People began to look at us half in a kindly, half contemptuous way, as people look in general upon those who fail, especially when they themselves have never tried to do anything at all but live, and having done it with considerable success look upon failure as a sort of minor crime, to be atoned for by humility, and to be reprobated after the fashion of adultery, with a half-deprecating laugh. Sometimes we borrowed ancient flint-lock guns and lay in wait for tapirs, but never saw them, as in the thick woods they move as silently as moles in sand, and leave as little trace. Luis told of how, mounted on a half-wild horse, he had long ago lassoed a tapir, and found himself and horse dragged slowly and invincibly towards a stream, the horse resisting terrified, the “gran besta” {51} apparently quite cool, so that at last he had to cut his lasso and escape from what he called the greatest peril of his life; he thought he was preserved partly by the interposition of the saints and partly by a “fetiço” which, in defiance of religion, he luckily had hanging round his neck.

Just when all hope was gone, and we thought seriously of leaving the horses to their fate, and pushing on with some of the best of them towards Rio, a man appeared upon the scene, and offered to buy them, half for money and half “a troco,” that is barter, for it appeared he was a pawnbroker and had a house full of silver horse-gear, which had never been redeemed. After much bargaining we closed for three hundred dollars and a lot of silver bridles, spurs, whips, and other stuff, after reserving four of the best horses for ourselves to make our journey back. At the head of so much capital our spirits rose, and we determined to push on to Paraguay, crossing the Uruguay and Parana, ride through the Misiones, and at Asuncion, where I had friends, take ship; _aguas abajo_, for the River Plate. We paid our debts and bid good-bye to Xavier, his wife and sallow daughters, and to all the slaves; gave Luis a silver-mounted whip, bought some provisions, put on our silver spurs, bridles, and as much as possible of the silver gear we had become possessed of, and at daybreak, mounted upon a cream-and-white piebald, the “Bayo Overo,” and a red bay known as the “Pateador,” leading a horse apiece, we passed out of Xavier’s “potrero,” {52} and started on the road.

During the last few days at Xavier’s we had taught the horses we intended to take to Paraguay to eat Indian corn, fastening them up without any other food all day, and putting salt into their mouths. The art once learnt, we had to stand beside them whilst they ate, to keep off chickens and pigs who drove them from their food, the horses being too stupid to help themselves. If I remember rightly, their ration was eight cobs, which we husked for them in our hands, blistering our fingers in the process as they had been burned. But now the trouble of the process was repaid, the horses going strongly all day long. We passed out of the little plain, skirted a pine-wood, rode up a little hill, and saw the country stretching towards the Uruguay, a park-like prairie interspersed with trees. Cruz Alta, a white patch shining against the green-grey plain encircled with its woods, was just in sight, the church-tower standing like a needle in the clear air against the sky. Half a league more and it dropped out of view, closing the door upon a sort of half Bœotian Arcady, but remaining still a memory after twenty years, with all the little incidents of the three months’ sojourn in the place fresh, and yet seeming as they had happened not to myself, but to a person I had met, and who had told the tale.

By easy stages we journeyed on, descending gradually towards the Uruguay, passing through country almost unpopulated, so large were the “fazendas,” and so little stocked. In the last century the Jesuits had here collected many tribes of Indians, and their history, is it not told in the pages of Montoya Lozano, Padre Guevara, and the other chroniclers of the doings of the “Company,” and to be read in the Archivo de Simancas, in that of Seville, and the uncatalogued “legajos” of the national library at Madrid? Throughout the country that we passed through, the fierce Paulistas had raided in times gone by, carrying off the Christian Indians to be slaves. The Portuguese and Spaniards had often fought—witness the names “O matto {54a} Portogues, O matto Castelhano,” and the like, showing where armies had manoeuvred, whilst the poor Indians waited like sheep, rejoicing when the butchers turned the knife at one another’s throats. To-day all trace of Jesuits and Missions have long disappeared, save for a ruined church or two, and here and there a grassy mound called in the language of the country a “tapera,” {54b} showing where a settlement had stood.

We camped at lonely ranchos inhabited, in general, by free negroes, or by the side of woods, choosing, if possible, some little cove in the wood, in which we tied the horses, building a fire in the mouth, laid down and slept, after concocting a vile beverage bought in Cruz Alta under the name of tea, but made I think of birch-leaves, and moistening pieces of the hard jerked beef in orange-juice to make it palatable.

So after five or six days of steady travelling, meeting, if I remember rightly, not a living soul upon the way, except a Gaucho from the Banda Oriental, who one night came to our fire, and seeing the horrible brew of tea in a tin-pot asked for a little of the “black water,” not knowing what it was, we reached the Uruguay. The river, nearly half-a-mile in breadth, flowed sluggishly between primeval woods, great alligators basked with their backs awash, flamingoes fished among the shallow pools, herons and cranes sat on dead stumps, vultures innumerable perched on trees, and in the purple bunches of the “seibos” humming-birds seemed to nestle, so rapid was their flight, and over all a darkish vapour hung, blending the trees and water into one, and making the “balsa,” as it laboured over after repeated calls, look like the barque of Styx. Upon the other side lay Corrientes, once a vast mission territory, but to-day, in the narrow upper portion that we traversed, almost a desert, that is a desert of tall grass with islands of timber dotted here and there, and an occasional band of ostriches scudding across the plain.

Camped by a wood about a quarter of a league from a lonely rancho, we were astonished, just at even-fall, by the arrival of the owner of the house mounted upon a half-wild horse, a spear in his hand, escorted by his two ragged sons mounted on half-wild ponies, and holding in their hands long canes to which a broken sheep-shear had been fixed. The object of his visit, as he said, was to inquire if we had seen a tiger which had killed some sheep, but his suspicious glance made me think he thought we had designs upon his cattle, and he had come to reconnoitre us; but our offer of some of the Cruz Alta tea soon made us friends, and after drinking almost a quart of it, he said “Muy rico,” and rode back to his house.

The third day’s riding brought us to the little town of Candelaria, built on a high bank over the Parana. Founded on Candlemas Day in 1665, it was the chief town of the Jesuit missions. Here, usually, the “Provincial” {56a} resided, and here the political business of their enormous territory was done. Stretching almost from Cruz Alta to within fifty leagues of Asuncion del Paraguay, and from Yapeyú upon the Uruguay almost to the “Salto de Guayra” upon the Parana, the territory embraced an area larger than many a kingdom, and was administered without an army, solely by about two hundred priests. The best proof of the success of their administration is that in these days the Indians, now to be numbered by a few thousand, were estimated at about two hundred thousand, and peopled all the country now left desolate, or which at least was desolate at the time of which I write. Even Azara, {56b} a bitter opponent of their system, writes of the Jesuit rule—“Although the Fathers had supreme command, they used their power with a gentleness and moderation which one cannot but admire.” {56c}

I leave to the economists, with all the reverend rabble rout of politicians, statistic-mongers and philanthropists, whether or not two hundred thousand living Indians were an asset in the world’s property; and to the pious I put this question, If, as I suppose, these men had souls just as immortal as our own, might it not have been better to preserve their bodies, those earthly envelopes without which no soul can live, rather than by exposing them to all those influences which the Jesuits dreaded, to kill them off, and leave their country without population for a hundred years?

But at the time of which I write neither my partner nor I cared much for speculations of that kind, but were more occupied with the condition of our horses, for, by that time, the “Bayo Overo” and the “Pateador” were become part and parcel of ourselves, and we thought more about their welfare than that of all the Indians upon earth.

La Candelaria, at the time when we passed through, was fallen from its proud estate, and had become a little Gaucho country town with sandy streets and horses tied at every door—a barren sun-burnt plaza, with a few Japanese ash-trees and Paraisos; the “Commandancia” with the Argentine blue-and-white barred flag, and trade-mark rising sun, hanging down listlessly against the post, and for all remnants of the Jesuit sway, the college turned into a town-hall, and the fine church, which seemed to mourn over the godless, careless, semi-Gaucho population in the streets. Here we disposed of our spare horses, bidding them good-bye, as they had been old friends, and got the “Bayo Overo” and the “Pateador” shod for the first time in their lives, an operation which took the united strength of half-a-dozen men to achieve, but was imperative, as their feet, accustomed to the stone-less plains of Paraguay, had suffered greatly in the mountain paths. In Candelaria, for the first time for many months, we sat down to a regular meal, in a building called “El Hotel Internacional”; drank wine of a suspicious kind, and seemed to have arrived in Paris, so great the change to the wild camps beside the forests, or the nights passed in the lone ranchos of the hilly district of Brazil.

A balsa drawn by a tug-boat took us across the Parana, here more than a mile broad, to Ytapua, and upon landing we found ourselves in quite another world. The little Paraguayan town of Ytapua, called by the Jesuits Encarnacion, lay, with its little port below it (where my friend Enrico Clerici had his store), upon a plateau hanging above the stream. The houses, built of canes and thatched with straw, differed extremely from the white “azotea” houses of the Candelaria on the other side. The people, dress, the vegetation, and the mode of life, differed still more in every aspect. The Paraguayan, with his shirt hanging outside his white duck trousers, bare feet, and cloak made of red cloth or baize, his broad straw hat and quiet manner, was the complete antithesis of the high-booted, loose-trousered, poncho-wearing Correntino, with his long knife and swaggering Gaucho air. The one a horseman of the plains, the other a footman of the forests; the Correntino brave even to rashness when taken man for man, but so incapable of discipline as to be practically useless as a soldier. The other as quiet as a sheep, and individually patient even to suffering blows, but once gathered together and instructed in the use of arms, as good a soldier, when well led, as it is possible to find; active and temperate, brave, and, if rather unintelligent, eager to risk his life at any time at the command of any of his chiefs. Such was the material from which Lopez, coward and grossly incompetent as he was, formed the battalions which for four years kept both Buenos Ayres and Brazil at bay, and only yielded when he himself was killed, mounted, as tradition has it, on the last horse of native breed left in the land.

But if the people and their dwellings were dissimilar, the countries in themselves were to the full at least as different. All through the upper part of Corrientes the soil is black, and the country open, park-like prairie dotted with trees; in Ytapua and the surrounding district, the earth bright red, and the primeval forest stretches close to the water’s edge. In Corrientes still the trees of the Pampas are occasionally seen, Talas and ñandubay with Coronillo and Lapacho; whereas in Paraguay, as by a bound, you pass to Curupay, {60a} Tatané, {60b} the Tarumá, {60c} the Ñandipá, {60d} the Jacaranda, and the Paratodo with its bright yellow flowers; whilst upon every tree lianas cling with orchidaceæ, known to the natives as “flowers of the air,” and through them all flit great butterflies, humming-birds dart, and underneath the damp vegetation of the sub-tropics, emphorbiaceæ, solanaceæ, myrtaceæ, and flowers and plants to drive a thousand botanists to madness, blossom and die unnamed. Here, too, the language changed, and Guarani became the dominant tongue, which, though spoken in Corrientes, is there used but occasionally, but among Paraguayans is their native speech, only the Alcaldes, officers, and upper classes as a general rule (at that time) speaking Spanish, and even then with a strange accent and much mixed with Guarani.

Two days we passed in Ytapua resting our horses, and I renewed my friendship with Enrico Clerici, an Italian, who had served with Garibaldi, and who, three years ago, I had met in the same place and given him a silver ring which he reported galvanized, and was accustomed to lend as a great favour for a specific against rheumatism. He kept a pulperia, and being a born fighter, his delight was, when a row occurred (which he styled “una barulla de Jesu Cristo”), to clear the place by flinging empty bottles from the bar. A handsome, gentlemanlike man, and terrible with a bottle in his hand, whether as weapon of offence or for the purposes of drink; withal well educated, and no doubt by this time long dead, slain by his favourite weapon, and his place filled by some fat, double-entry Basque or grasping Catalan, or by some portly emigrant from Germany.

Not wishing to be confined within a house, a prey to the mosquitoes, we camped in the chief square, and strolling round about the town, I came on an old friend.

Not far outside the village a Correntino butcher had his shop, a little straw-thatched hut, with strings of fresh jerked beef festooning all the place; the owner stood outside dressed in the costume of a Gaucho of the southern plains. I did not know him, and we began to talk, when I perceived, tied underneath a shed, a fine, dark chestnut horse, saddled and bitted in the most approved of Gaucho style. He somehow seemed familiar, and the Correntino, seeing me looking at his horse, asked if I knew the brand, but looking at it I failed to recognize it, when on a sudden my memory was lighted up. Three years ago, in an “estero” {62} outside Caapucú, at night, journeying in company with a friend, one Hermann, whose only means of communication with me was a jargon of Spanish mixed with “Plaat Deutsch,” we met a Correntino, and as our horses mutually drowned our approach by splashing with their feet, our meeting terrified us both. Frightened, he drew his knife, and I a pistol, and Hermann lugged out a rusty sword, which he wore stuck through his horse’s girths. But explanations followed, and no blood was shed, and then we drew aside into a little hillock, called in the language of the place an “albardon,” sat down and talked, and asking whence he came was told from Ytapua. Now Ytapua was three days’ journey distant on an ordinary horse, and I looked carefully at the horse, and wondered why his owner had ridden him so hard. He, I now saw, was the horse I had seen that night, and the Correntino recognized me, and laughing said he had killed a man near Ytapua, and was (as he said) “retreating” when he met me in the marsh. The horse, no doubt, was one of the best for a long journey I have ever seen, and after quoting to his owner that “a dark chestnut horse may die, but cannot tire,” {63a} we separated, and, no doubt, for years afterwards our meeting was the subject of his talk.

No doubt the citizens of Ytapua were scandalized at our not coming to the town, and the Alcalde came to interview us, but we assured him that in virtue of a vow we slept outside, and in a moment all his fears were gone.

Striking right through the then desolated Misiones, passing the river Aguapey, our horses almost swimming, skirting by forests where red macaws hovered like hawks and parrots chattered; passing through open plains grown over here and there with Yatais, {63b} splashing for hours through wet esteros, missing the road occasionally, as I had travelled it but once, and then three years ago, and at the time I write of huts were few and far between, and population scanty, we came, upon the evening of the second day, near to a place called Ñacuti. This was the point for which I had been making, for near it was an estancia {63c} called the “Potrero San Antonio,” the property of Dr. Stewart, a well-known man in Paraguay. Nature had seemed to work to make the place impregnable. On three sides of the land, which measured eight or ten miles in length on every side, forks of a river ran, and at the fourth they came so close together that a short fence, not half-a-mile in length, closed up the circle, and cattle once inside were safe but for the tigers, which at that time abounded, and had grown so fierce by reason of the want of population that they sometimes killed horses or cows close to the door of the house. A short “picada,” of about a quarter of a mile in length, cut through the wood, led to the gate. Through it in times gone by I often rode at night in terror, with a pistol in my hand, the heavy foliage of the trees brushing my hat, and thinking every instant that a tiger would jump out. One night when close up to the bamboo bars I heard a grunt, thought my last hour had come, fired, and brought something down; approached, and found it was a peccary; and then, tearing the bars down in a hurry, got to horse, and galloped nine miles to the house, thinking each moment that the herd of peccaries was close behind and panting for my blood.

On this occasion all was still; the passage through the orange trees was dark, their scent oppressive, as the leaves just stirred in the hot north wind, and fire-flies glistened to and fro amongst the flowers; great bats flew heavily, and the quarter of a mile seemed mortal, and as if it led to hell.

Nothing occurred, and coming to the bars we found them on the ground; putting them up we conscientiously cursed the fool who left them out of place, and riding out into the moonlight, after a little trouble found the sandy, deep-banked trail which led up to the house. All the nine miles we passed by islands of great woods, peninsulas and archipelagos jutting out into the still plain, and all their bases swathed in white mists like water: the Yatais looked ghostly standing starkly in the grass; from the lagoons came the shrill croak of frogs, great moths came fluttering across our path, and the whole woods seemed filled with noise, as if the dwellers in them, silent through the day, were keeping holiday at night. As for the past two days we had eaten nothing but a few oranges and pieces of jerked beef, moistening them in the muddy water of the streams, our talk was of the welcome we should get, the supper, and of the comfortable time we then should pass for a few days to give our horses rest.

We passed the tiger-trap, a structure built after the fashion of an enormous mouse-trap, of strong bamboos; skirted along a wood in which an ominous growling and rustling made our horses start, and then it struck me as curious that there were no cattle feeding in the plain, no horses, and that the whole potrero seemed strangely desolate; but the house just showing at the edge of a small grove of peach-trees drove all these speculations out of my head: thinking upon the welcome, and the dinner, for we had eaten nothing since daybreak, and were fasting, as the natives say, from everything but sin, we reached the door. The house was dark, no troop of dogs rushed out to bark and seize our horses’ tails; we shouted, hammered with our whips, fired our revolvers, and nothing answered us.

Dismounting, we found everything bolted and barred, and going to the back, on the kitchen-hearth a few red embers, and thus knew that some one had been lately in the place. Nothing to eat, the woods evidently full of tigers, and our horses far too tired to start again, we were just about to unsaddle and lie down and sleep, when a white figure stole out from the peach-trees, and tried to gain the shelter of the corral some sixty yards away. Jumping on horseback we gave chase, and coming up with the fugitive found it to be a Paraguayan woman, who with her little daughter were the sole inhabitants, her husband having gone to the nearest village to buy provisions, and left her all alone, warning her earnestly before he left to keep the doors shut during the night on account of the tigers, and not to venture near the woods even in daylight till he should have come back. Finding herself confronted by two armed, mounted men, dressed in the clothes of Correntinos, who had an evil reputation in Paraguay, her terror was extreme. Her daughter, a little girl of eight or nine, crept out from behind a tree, and in a moment we were friends. Unluckily for us, she had no food of any kind, and but a little maté, which she prepared for us. She then remembered that the trees were covered with peaches, and went out and gathered some, but they were hard as stones; nevertheless we ate a quantity of them, and having tied our horses close to the house, not twenty paces from the door, in long lush grass, we lay down in the verandah, and did not wake till it was almost noon. When we awoke we found the woman had been up betimes and gone on foot five or six miles away to look for food. She brought some mandioca, and two or three dozen oranges, and a piece of almost putrefied jerked beef, all which we ate as heartily as if it had been the most delicious food on earth.

To my annoyance I found my horse weak and dejected, and several large clots of dried-up blood under the hair of his mane, and saw at once a vampire bat had fixed upon him, and no doubt sucked almost a quart of blood. We washed him in a pond close to the house, and he got better, and after eating some of the hard and unripe peaches we again lay down to sleep. By evening the woman’s husband had returned, and proved to be a little lame and withered-looking man, mounted upon a lean and skinny horse. He undertook to guide us to Asuncion, remarking that it was twenty years since he had seen the capital, but that he knew the road as if he was accustomed to go there every day. With a slight lapsus this turned out to be the case, and just at daybreak we left the Potrero San Antonio, where once before I had passed a month roaming about the woods, waiting for tigers in a tree at night, and never thinking that, in three years’ time, I should return and find it desolate. It seemed that Dr. Stewart, not finding the speculation pay, had sold his cattle, and his manager, one Oliver, a Californian “Forty-niner,” and his Paraguayan wife, had removed to a place some twenty leagues away, upon the road towards Asuncion.

There we determined to go and rest our horses, and left the place, our guide Florencio’s wife impressing on him to be sure and bring her back a little missal from the capital, and he, just like an Arab or an Indian leaving home, unmoved, merely observing that the folk in Asuncion were “muy ladino” (very cunning), and it behoved a Christian to take care.