The Plains of Patagonia. 211 
of only five miles separated me from the hidden green 
valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote 
seemed that grey waste, 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 until 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 I 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 was 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 
