PATAGONIA SEMI-DESERT 161 



of them, half-dead bundles of crowded twigs and stems, 

 look like bristling besoms ; some resemble heaths ; others 

 crawl, or spread in cushions : grass plays here but an 

 unimportant part. Thickets of these woody perennials 

 alternate irregularly with naked tracts, and in winter 

 cast their scanty foliage. Here again countless marshes, 

 mostly brackish or salt, are formed in the hollows, or 

 by the rivers losing themselves in the sand and gravel ; 

 they allow of the usual salt-bush vegetation. 



Little can be done with such a land, and it lies 

 mostly unused and unusable : settlements may, how- 

 ever, be found along the coast, or along the few 

 freshwater rivers. The intervening wastes are but 

 travesias, where only wild Indians manage to eke out 

 a precarious living, mostly by hunting and fishing. 



South Patagonia. A region of steppe extends to the 

 south and west of the Patagonian semi-desert, beginning 

 in a strip along the Andes, and gradually widening to 

 the south-east down to the Atlantic, covering the whole 

 breadth of the low south Patagonian plateau and the 

 north-east corner of Fuegia. 



The latitude is now high, and the narrow point of the 

 austral continent plunges into the zone of raw and 

 moist south-westerlies. The Andes have become at once 

 lower and more interrupted, with, as a result, a play of 

 oceanic winds over the land, and a cool, cloudy, some- 

 what moist and windy climate, where winter is not 

 extreme. The ground is the continuation of that farther 

 north: a low plateau or high plain, undulating and 

 broken, consisting of shingle, rubble and gravel, clay 

 and sand. These conditions are not favourable to tree- 

 growth; the country may be described as a vast 

 treeless moor, offering a rough, irregular surface. Tus- 

 socks of the tussock-grass, poa flabellata, build huge 



