44 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



sistent, would be unconscious of his blindness. It 

 was thus more to him than all other objects and 

 forces in nature ; the Inca might worship sun and 

 lightning and rainbow; to the inhabitant of the 

 valley the river was more than these, the most 

 powerful thing in nature, the most beneficent, and 

 his chief god. 



I do not know, nor can any one know, whether 

 the former dwellers in the valley left any descend- 

 ants, any survivors of that age that left some 

 traces of a brightening intellect on its stone work. 

 Probably not ; the few Indians now inhabiting the 

 valley are most probably modern colonists of an- 

 other family or nation ; yet it did not surprise me 

 to hear that some of these half-tame, half-chris- 

 tianized savages had, not long before my visit, 

 sacrificed a white bull to the river, slaying it on 

 the bank and casting its warm, bleeding body into 

 the current. 



Even the European colonists have not been un- 

 affected psychologically by the peculiar conditions 

 they live in, and by the river, on which they are 

 dependent. When first I became cognizant of this 

 feeling, which was very soon, I was disposed to 

 laugh a little at the very large place the river 

 occupied in all men's minds; but after a few 

 months of life on its banks it was hardly less to 

 me than to others, and I experienced a kind of 

 shame when I recalled my former want of rever- 

 ence, as if I had made a jest of something sacred. 

 Nor to this day can I think of the Patagonian 



