2o8 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



was siin'ouuded 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 ?" 



That he did not in this passage hit on the right 

 explanation of the sensations he experienced in 

 Patagonia, and of the strength of the impressions it 

 made on his mind, I am quite convinced ; for the 

 thing is just as true of to-day as of the time, in 

 1836, when he wrote that tlie case was not joeculiar 

 to himself. Yet since that date — which now, thanks 

 to Darwin, seems so remote to the naturalist — - 

 those desolate regions have ceased to be impracti- 

 cable, and, although still uninhabited and uninhabit- 

 able, 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 by 

 whites, which was long believed to exist in the un- 

 known 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 ]\Ianoa, which Alonzo Pizarro and his false 

 friend Orellana failed to discover. The traveller of 

 to-day really expects to see nothing more exciting 

 than a solitary huanaco keeping w^atch on a hill- 

 top, and a few grey-plumaged rheas flying from 

 him, and, possibly, a band of long-haired roving 

 savages, with their faces painted black and red. 



