ARGENTINA 125 



free calcareous matter which the soil, formerly 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 without 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 win- 

 dows 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 midday 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 dis- 

 mount 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 watercourse and the eternal wire 

 fence, draw a level furrow for 700 miles straight south. 

 to where the hills of Curumalan, rising inconsequent ly 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 com- 

 mercial centre of Santa Fe province and second in importance 

 in the Republic. 



'' Between Buenos Aires and Rosario is found a bed of ex- 



