DEAD TURTLE ON THE SHORE. 105 



a cemetery, and reminded me of a spot on the River 

 Gallegos in Patagonia, where the guanacos (a kind 

 of llama) assemble to pay the debt of nature, and leave 

 their bones to whiten the surface of the plain. Never 

 before, on any occasion, had we seen dead turtle in 

 any similar position ; how they could have got there 

 was a mystery, unless we suppose them to have been 

 thrown up by some earthquake wave. They had 

 evidently not been transported thither by the hand of 

 man, though, as I have observed, some of the na- 

 tives who thinly inhabit this district, finding them 

 there, ready to their hand, had availed themselves 

 of the gifts of fortune. I could not help, as I gazed 

 on this remarkable scene, calling to mind the mar- 

 vellous elephant cemetery described by Sinbad the 

 Sailor. It is possible that the observation of some 

 similar phenomenon may have suggested to the 

 imagination of the authors of the Thousand and One 

 Nights their romantic fiction. At any rate an air of 

 mystery will always hang round Turtle Point until 

 the facts I have mentioned shall have been explained. 

 The nature of this part of the country I have be- 

 fore described on my visit to Indian Hill. A ridge of 

 breakers ran off north a couple of miles from our sta- 

 tion; a low point, bearing W. l6°S. about eight or nine 

 miles, with an opening trending in south intervening, 

 with some slightly elevated land bearing S. 34° W. 

 about four or five leagues, terminated our view to the 

 westward. We found the tide much weaker on this side 

 of the entrance, not exceeding three miles an hour ; 

 the stream ran up three-quarters of an hour after 



