42 Idle Days in Patagonia. 
to me, and for a while I saw nature as the savage sees 
it, and as he saw it in that stone age I pondered over, 
only without the supernaturalism that has so large 
a place in his mind. By taking thought I am con- 
vinced that we can make no progress in this direc- 
tion, simply because we cannot voluntarily escape 
from our own personality, our environment, our 
outlook on Nature. 
Not only were my efforts idle, but merely to 
think on the subject sometimes had the effect of 
bringing a shadow, a something of melancholy, over 
my mind, the temper which is fatal to investigation, 
causing “‘all things to droop and languish.” In 
such a mood I would make my way to one of the 
half-a-dozen ancient burial-places existing in the 
neighbourhood of the house I was staying at. Asa 
preference I would go to the largest and most popu- 
lous, where half an acre of earth was strewn thick 
with crumbling skeletons. Here by searching 
closely a few arrow-heads and ornaments, that had 
been interred with the dead, could also be found. 
And here I would sit and walk about on the hot 
barren yellow sand—the faithless sand to which the 
hitter secret had so long ago been vainly entrusted ; 
careful in walking not to touch an exposed skull 
with my foot, although the hoof of the next wild 
thing that passed would shatter it to pieces like a 
vessel of fragile glass. The polished intensely white 
surfaces of such skulls as had been longest exposed 
to the sun reflected the noonday light so powerfully 
that it almost pained the eyes to look at them. In 
