94 THE WORLD'S MEAT FUTURE 



dilleras and the coastline the water becomes brackish, and at 

 times nndrinkably bitter. This quality is, without doubt, due to 

 the great quantity of free calcareous matter which the soil, for- 

 merly an ocean bed, contains, and through which the hill 

 streams percolate on their way to the ocean. The average 

 rainfall of the coast belt is some 35 in., and with the usual 

 interlude of a short dry spell in early summer, is throughout 

 the remainder of the year a fairly constant quantity. 



"Happy is the country Avithout a history. Happy, we may 

 add. is the farm that has no scenery. The traveller who has 

 no farming interests soon wearies of the monotonous fertility 

 of the panorama that unfolds itself to his gaze from the windows 

 of the excellent trains that serve the rich littoral. He turns 

 with a yawn to the distractions of his magazine, and his verdict, 

 delivered later to inquiring friends, is that Argentina is the 

 flattest country that he has ever seen. It may not be strict 

 grammar — once a country is flat it stays so — but it is strict 

 truth. Sheep at mid-day loom up as big as oxen in the 

 refraction that quivers up from the hot, unvarying surface. 

 Distances are deceiving to newcomers. The fence we start to 

 walk out to appears to be further off than we expected. That 

 dark clump, however, which we take to be the eucalyptus grove 

 shadowing some estancia house is within easy riding distance, 

 for our horizon is limited to a very few miles. As we draw 

 nearer the tree-trunks rise up before us in the very manner 

 of a vessel's masts at sea, and when we finally dismount in their 

 shade we see on the new horizon around us other clumps, hull 

 down. A colonist could plant his plough-share in the rich, 

 brown-black earth above Rosario. and, save for an occasional 

 \vaterconrse and the eternal wire fence, draw a level furrow for 

 700 miles straight south, to where the hills of Curumalan, rising 

 inconsequently out of the flat prairies, mark the neighbourhood 

 of the port of Bahia Blanca. 



''Two hundred miles above Buenos Aires the main current of 

 the Parana has scoured a deep channel at the foot of the tall 

 bluffs that here bound its western bank. This has been a good 

 and sufficient reason for the growth of Rosario, the commercial 

 centre of Santa Fe province and second in importance in the 

 Republic. 



"Between Buenos Aires and Rosario is found a bed of exreptionally 

 rich alluvial stretching some forty ni'les inland. This is the 

 pick of the maize country. As the cars whirl along the long 



