THE PATAGOXIAN STEPPE. 367 



lasted for ages, and tliere appears no limit to their duration tLrough future time. 

 Jf, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an impassable 

 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 ?" * 



Since Darwin's time, however, " these desolate regions have ceased to be 

 impracticable, 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 Rio Negro to the Straits of Magellan, and has been found all barren. The 

 mysterious illusive city, peopled ly 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 traveller's imagination as the glittering capital 

 of Great Manoa, which Alonzo Pizarro and his false friend, Orellana, failed to 

 discover. The traveller of to-day expects to see nothing more exciting than a 

 solitary huanaco keeping watch on a hill-top, and a few grey-plumaged rheas 

 flying from him, and possibly a band of long-haired roving savages, with tlieir 

 faces painted black and red. 



" Yet, in spite of accurate knowledge, the old charm still exists in all its 

 . freshness ; and after all the discomforts and sufferings endured in a desert cursed 

 with eternal barrenness, the returned traveller finds in after years that it still 

 keeps its hold on him, that it shines brighter in memory and is dearer to him 

 than any other region he may have visited. In Patagonia the monotony of the 

 plains, or expanse of low hills, the universal unrelieved greyness of everything, 

 and the absence of animal forms and objects nevv to the eye, leave the mind open 

 and free to receive an impression of visible nature as a whole. One gazes on 

 the prospect as on the sea, for it stretches away, sea-like, without change, into 

 infinitude ; but without the sparkle of water, the changes of hue which shadows 

 and sunlight and nearness and distance give, and mutions of waves and white 

 flashes of foam. It has a look of antiquity, of desolation, of eternal peace, of 

 a desert that has been a desert fi-om of old, and will continue a desert for 

 ever." f 



The Pampas. 



Absolutely level plains occur only in Argentina proper north of the Pio 

 Colorado. These horizontal spaces stand at different heights above the Plate 

 estuary, and also present other contrasts due to the varying nature of soil and 

 climate. The northern region, comprised between the foothills and the course of 

 the Paraguay-Parana, constitutes the so-called Chaco (Gran Chaco), which owes 

 its peculiar aspect to its vegetation of thorn 3^ scrub, palm groves, and open or leafy 

 woodlands. 



Other inland plains, lying farther south on both sides of the Cordoba heights, 



* Voxjage of the Beagle. f Idle Bays in Patagonia. 



