86 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



when most vexing and destructive to your plans, 

 interest your mind, and call up a hundred latent 

 energies it is a joy to discover. But you have 

 not yet sounded all her depths; nor can you im- 

 agine, seeing her frequent gay smiles, to what 

 length her fierce resentment may carry her. 

 Sometimes, as if roused to sudden frenzy at the 

 indignities you are subjecting her to hacking at 

 her trees, turning up her cushioned soil, and 

 trampling down her grass and flowers she ar- 

 rays herself in her blackest, most terrible aspect, 

 and like a beautiful woman who in her fury has no 

 regard for her beauty, she plucks up her noblest 

 trees by the roots, and scooping up the very soil 

 from the earth whirls it aloft to give a more hor- 

 rible gloom to the heavens. And darkness not be- 

 ing terrifying enough, she kindles up the mighty 

 chaos she has created into a blaze of intolerable 

 light, while the solid world is shaken to its foun- 

 dations with her wrathful thunders. When de- 

 struction seems about to fall on man and all his 

 works, when you are prostrate and ready to perish 

 with excessive fear, lo, the mood changes, the furi- 

 ous passion has spent itself, and there is no trace 

 left of it when you look up only to encounter her 

 peaceful reassuring smile. These sublime moods 

 are, however, infrequent and soon forgotten ; man 

 learns to despise the threats of a cataclysm that 

 never comes, and goes forth once more to level the 

 ancient trees, to invert the soil, and pasture his 

 herds on her grasses and flowers. He will sub- 



