202 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an im- 

 passable breadth of water, or by deserts heated to 

 an intolerable excess, who would not look at these 

 last boundaries to man 's knowledge with deep but 

 ill-defined sensations ? ' ' 



That he did not in this passage hit on the right 

 explanation of the sensations he experienced in 

 Patagonia, and of the strength of the impressions 

 it made on his mind, I am quite convinced ; for the 

 thing is just as true of to-day as of the time, in 

 1836, when he wrote that the case was not peculiar 

 to himself. Yet since that date which now, 

 thanks to Darwin, seems so remote to the natural- 

 ist those desolate regions have ceased to be im- 

 practicable, and, although still uninhabited and 

 uninhabitable, except to a few nomads, they are no 

 longer unknown. During the last twenty years 

 the country has been crossed in various directions, 

 from the Atlantic to the Andes, and from the Eio 

 Negro to the Straits of Magellan, and has been 

 found all barren. The mysterious illusive city, 

 peopled by whites, which was long believed to 

 exist in the unknown interior, in a valley called 

 Trapalanda, is to moderns a myth, a mirage of 

 the mind, as little to the traveler's imagination as 

 the glittering capital of great Manoa, which 

 Alonzo Pizarro and his false friend Orellana failed 

 to discover. The traveler of to-day really expects 

 to see nothing more exciting than a solitary huan- 

 aco keeping watch on a hill-top, and a few gray- 

 plumaged rheas flying from him, and, possibly, a 



