208 Idle Days in Patagonia. 
was surrounded 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 the case was not peculiar 
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 Manoa, 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 watch 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. 
