CHAPTER IV. 
ASPECTS OF THE VALLEY. 
To go back for a brief space to those Golgothas that 
I frequently visited in the valley, not as collector 
nor archeologist, and in no scientific spirit, but 
only, as it seemed, to indulge in mournful thoughts. 
If by looking into the empty cavity of one of those 
broken unburied skulls I had been able to see, as 
in a magic glass, an image of the world as it once 
existed in the living brain, what should I have seen ? 
Such a question would not and could not, I imagine, 
be suggested by the sight of a bleached broken 
human skull in any other region; but in Patagonia 
it does not seem grotesque, nor merely idle, nor 
quite fanciful, like Buffon’s notion of a geometric 
figure impressed on the hive-bee’s brain. On the 
contrary, it strikes one there as natural; and the 
answer to it is easy, and only one answer is 
possible. 
In the cavity, extending from side to side, there 
would have appeared a band of colour; its margins 
grey, growing fainter and bluer outwardly, and 
finally fading into nothing ; between the grey edges 
the band would be green; and along this green 
middle band, not always keeping to the centre, 
