276 THROUGH THE HEART OF PATAGONIA 



and on the carpet of moss beneath them lay here and there a dead 

 tree. 



Few places are more mournful than this region when rain is 

 falling. After the rain ceases, mists arise and circle round you, 

 shutting you in, these in their turn often being dissipated by a 

 sudden fierce squall. In summer the climate is very humid, and 

 many of the plants have the fat damp aspect seldom observable 

 save in the tropics. The huge masses of rank vegetation seem 

 to stifle you ; once you have been in that great black insatiable 

 woodland you can never quite shake off its influence. 



In that particular forest was one glade by the outrunning of a 

 little brook where the ground was thick with orchids.* 



One reads of " virgin forests," but one must behold them to com- 

 prehend the reality that underlies the wording. For days you saw 

 no living thing, heard no human tones, nothing but the immense 

 voices of the thunder, the glacier and the everlasting wind. The 

 solitude of Patagonia, its peculiar characteristic of lack of human life 

 in the present and the past, was borne in upon one under that high 

 dome of foliage, and in those aisles abysmally vast, stretching north, 

 south, east and west. In any other country legends would have 

 gathered round these places, some touch of man's presence and 

 adventure humanised them, so to speak. In Patagonia the fancy 

 had nothing to grip, to grow upon, no story of joy or of sorrow. 

 Solitude reigned alone, and nature spoke only by the awful un- 

 interpreted tongues of God's elements. 



* There were also orchids growing about the foothills of the Cordillera. Those I 

 brought back are now under the care of the Curator of the Royal Botanical Gardens 

 at Kew. They should flower before this book is in print. 



