36 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



festatiou of tlio iiitolligeiif life and ]»o\vnr that is in 

 all tilings. 



The river has its turbid days, although few and 

 far between. One morning, on going down to the 

 water, I was astonished to find it no longer the 

 lovely hue of the previous evening, but dull red — 

 red with the red earth that some swollen tributary 

 hundreds of miles to the west had poured into its 

 current. This change lasts only a day or two, after 

 which the river runs green and pure again. 



The valley at the end of a long hot windy 

 summer had an excessively dry and barren appear- 

 ance. The country, I was told, had suffered from 

 scarcity of rain for three years : at some points 

 even the roots of the dry dead grass had been blown 

 away, and when the wind was strong a cloud of 

 yellow dust hung all day over the valley. In such 

 places sheep were dying of starvation : cattle and 

 horses fared bettor, as they went out into the 

 uplands to browse on the bushes. The valley soil 

 is thin, being principally sand and gravel, with a 

 slight admixture of vegetalile luould ; and its 

 original vegetation was made up of coarse peren- 

 nial grasses, herbaceous shrubs and rushes : the 

 domestic cattle introduced by the white settlers 

 destroyed these slow-growing grasses and plants, 

 and, as has happened in most temperate regions of 

 the globe colonized by Europeans, the sweet, quick- 

 growing, short-lived grasses and clovers of the Old 

 World sprang up and occupied the soil. Here, 

 however, owing to its poverty, the excessive dry- 



