The Dying Huanaco. 3 1 7 



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 Grallegos rivers, where the river valleys are 

 covered with dense primaeval 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. England has one artist 

 who might show it to us on canvas, who would 

 be able to catch the feeling of such a scene of 



