198 IN THE WILDS OF SOUTH AMERICA 



don, who had been engaged some years in making a survey 

 through Matto Grosso for a telegraph-line, had discovered 

 the headwaters of an unmapped river. This he had called 

 the Rio da Dumda, or River of Doubt, for no one knew 

 whither it went. The invitation to explore and map 

 this stream was tendered to Colonel Roosevelt, and he 

 accepted it. 



We left the colonel at Rio de Janeiro, after making 

 arrangements to meet subsequently, and continued on to 

 Buenos Aires, spending a day en route in Santos, and one in 

 Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. 



Although we had read and heard a great deal about the 

 city of Buenos Aires, we were hardly prepared for the 

 pleasant surprise that awaited us. The population of this 

 metropolis of the south is more than a million and a half, 

 and the city presents a clean, dignified appearance. In 

 many respects it is as modern as New York City. There 

 are numbers of tall edifices patterned after our own sky- 

 scrapers, large hotels, and theatres. An electric subway 

 was just being opened, and the crowds in the Calle Florida 

 in the late afternoon rival those of Broadway. The climate 

 is cool and agreeable. One of the things that particularly 

 attracted our attention was the presence one day of swarms 

 of dragon-flies flying in a steady stream high above the 

 city; they were blown in by violent winds, or pamperos, 

 which sweep across the level plains country, and gave one 

 the impression of a raging snow-storm. 



As Mr. Cherrie and I were eager to devote every avail- 

 able moment to zoological work, we left Fiala and Sigg, 

 whose duty it was to look after the rather appalling amount 

 of luggage, and secured passage on the Argentine North- 

 western Railroad, which had just inaugurated through ser- 

 vice to Asuncion, Paraguay. We took only the small 

 amount of equipment necessary for few weeks' work, as 

 the two others were to come up with the remainder of the 

 baggage on the first available freight-boat. Our train was 

 the second to make the through trip and was scheduled to 



