The Dying Fluanaco. 317 
this strange instinct in their personal narratives, 
and their observations have since been fully con- 
firmed by others. The best known of these dying 
or burial-places are on the banks of the Santa Cruz 
and Gallegos rivers, where the river valleys are 
covered with dense primeval thickets of bushes and 
trees of stunted growth; there the ground is covered 
with the bones of countless dead generations. 
«The animals,’ says Darwin, ‘‘ in most cases must 
have crawled, before dying, beneath and among the 
bushes.’ A strange instinct in a creature so pre- 
eminently social in its habits; a dweller all its life 
long on the open, barren plateaus and mountain 
sides! What a subject for a painter! The grey 
wilderness of dwarf thorn trees, aged and grotesque 
and scanty-leaved, nourished for a thousand years 
on the bones that whiten the stony ground at their 
roots; the interior lit faintly with the rays of the 
departing sun, chill and grey, and silent and 
motionless—the huanacos’ Golgotha. In the long 
centuries, stretching back into a dim immeasurable 
past, so many of this race have journeyed hither 
from the mountain and the plain to suffer the 
sharp pang of death, that, to the imagination, 
something of it all seems to have passed into that 
hushed and mournful nature. And now one more, 
the latest pilgrim, has come, all his little strength 
spent in his struggle to penetrate the close thicket ; 
looking old and gaunt and ghostly in the twilight ; 
with long ragged hair; staring into the gloom out 
of death-dimmed sunken eyes. One artist we have 
who might show it to us on canvas, who would 
be able to catch the feeling of such a scene—of 
