Tlie Plains of Palagonia. 211 



of only five miles separated me from the hidden green 

 valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote 

 seemed that grey Avaste, stretching away into 

 infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where 

 the wild animals are so few that they have made no 

 discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns. 

 There I might have dropped down and died, and 

 my flesh been devoured by birds, and my bones 

 bleached white in sun and wind, and no person 

 would have found them, and it would have been 

 forgotten that one had ridden forth in the morning 

 and had not returned. Or if, like the few wild 

 animals there — puma, huanaco, and hare-like doli- 

 chotis, or Darwin's rhea and the crested tinamou 

 among the birds— I had been able to exist without 

 water, I might have made myself a hermitage of 

 brushwood or dug-out in the side of a cliff", and 

 dwelt there luitil I had grown grey as the stones 

 and trees around me, and no human foot would 

 have stumbled on my hiding-place. 



Not once, nor twice, nor thrice, but day after 

 day T returned to this solitude, going to it in the 

 morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it 

 only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun 

 compelled me. And yet I had no object in going — 

 no motive which could be put into words ; for 

 although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot 

 — the shooting w^as all left behind in the valley. 

 Sometimes a dolichotis, starting up at my approach, 

 flashed for one moment on my sight, to vanish the 

 next moment in the continuous thicket; or a covey 



p 2 



