THE CHACO. 
171 
The impressions of the Chaco which remain 
are its bright beauty, its mixture of wood and 
plain, its palm trees, its birds, and its flatness. 
It is absolutely dead level. True, when you go 
into the patches of monte you see that they are 
a little, very little, higher than the campo. It 
is so little that it does nothing to break the 
general uniformity; but it is just this little 
which causes their existence, and makes such 
a sharp division between them and the campo. 
So flat is the Chaco, that most of it is a marsh 
in the wet season. When we got there the 
water was drying up, and large tracts, where 
when we first went the water and mud was 
nearly up to the knee, were hard and dry before 
we left. The walking is easy : the grass is 
long, but usually not tussocky, and the ground 
is firm and clean. Even in the wet parts you 
do not sink deep, and a good pair of field boots 
will see you through. But I am talking only of 
the dry season of a dry year. It must be very 
different in the wet. And, besides these 
changes of season, the Chaco is subject to 
periodic floodings, the causes of which are not 
distinctly known, which recur in cycles. Then 
all the year the water stands on the flat plain, 
and it becomes one great marsh, where the 
stork, the egret, the ibis, the heron, and every 
bird long of leg : the goose, the duck and all the 
tribe of swimmers : and those strange marsh 
birds which trip with immense feet lightly and 
