368 AMAZONIA AND LA PLATA. 



are, on the contraiy, completely bare, and studded with saline basins glittering 

 in the solar rays. Lastly, the savannas, which stretch from the Cordoba uplands 

 to the lower Parana, and from the Plate estuury to the Patagonian foothills, take 

 the name of pampas, a Quichua word applied ou the Peruvian and Bolivian 

 plateaux to level spaces, terraces, or bottom lands. Farther south, in Patagonia 

 proper, the grassy pampas gradually merge in a stony steppe covered with 

 scrub or bush. 



Of all the Argentine regions the pampas have been most frequently described, 

 because they begin on the very outskirts of the large cities — Buenos Ayres, 

 Rosario, Santa Fé — and have thus to be traversed to reach the provinces of the 

 F'ar West. They are not uniformly level, as might be supposed, but consist, 

 in reality, of a gently inclined terrace falling from 3,000 to 600 or 700 feet 

 between the foot of the Cordoba hills and the Rio Salado of Buenos Ayres, and a 

 low-lying plain falling from 250 to 120 feet, which develops a semi-circular zone 

 along the Parana and the Plate estuary, as far as the Atlantic. 



The more elevated terrace constitutes the steppe proper, the central pampa, 

 which always stands above the level of the great inundations, whereas the low- 

 lying plain was formerly laid under water by the rivers in flood. This region 

 must be regarded as an alluvial tract deposited by the broad moving sea of the 

 Parana, and gradually dried by the layers of fine loess analogous to the yellow 

 earth of China, strewn over the surface by the west winds. No stones are found 

 intermingled with these upper beds of the pampas. The rocky foundation on 

 which they rest consists of a very fine-grained sandstone of miocène origin, like 

 the tertiary beds of Patagonia. 



The general aspect of the pampas changes continuall}'^, not only with the seasons, 

 but even with the time of day. Their appearance at sunrise in the summer months is 

 pictured b}^ Rumbold as indescribably beautiful. " No words can convey an adequate 

 idea of the beauty and freshness of the prairie at this early hour. The young 

 sun, but just risen like oui'selves, floods the low and perfectly level horizon with a 

 flush of pink and yellow light. At once you realise the full force of the well- 

 known hackneyed image which compares the boundless expanse of plain to an 

 ocean solitude, for the effect is truly that of sunrise out upon the face of the 

 waste of waters. The fiery disc emerges out of what seems a sea of verdure, all 

 burned and brown though everything be in reality, and in its slanting rays the 

 tip of each blade of grass, the giant thistles with their rose-purple crowns, the 

 graceful floss-like panicles of the parapa grass (py'a cortndcra), just touched by 

 the breeze and all glittering with dew, undulate before the eye, like the 

 successive sparkling lines that mark the lazy roll of the deep in the dawn of a 

 tropical calm. 



" The sky above, of a most lovely pale azure and of wonderful transparency, 

 has not yet deepened into that almost painful hue of crude cobalt it acquires 

 in the full blaze of noontide. In the west the vapours of night have not 

 entirely I'olled away, while down in the dips and de^îressions of the ground — 

 canadas, as they call them here — and over the reed-fenced lagtaias, a thin blue mist 



