THE LEMON-SHAPED DOME OF THE CAPITAL.
La Plata has its parks with muddy little ponds and lakes, gardens with beautiful trees, an avenue of giant eucalyptus trees, and its zoological gardens, with a few specimens, that give signs of life that the city could ill spare.
With the exception of Belgrano and Palermo, which are filled with superbly appointed mansions, the suburbs of Buenos Ayres are depressing and sordid. As the town fades into the camp, the houses become poorer and poorer, streets are like quagmires, and old tin cans are utilised for building the shacks occupied by the squalid poor, for, like all great cities, Buenos Ayres has them in great abundance, a mixed lot of the unfit of European and native races.
But the cities are only the small part of Argentina. They are the exchanges rather than the creators of its wealth, a wealth which lies in the far-spreading Pampas, which form the natural feature of the republic. Much has been written upon them, and nearly everyone who has undertaken the task has set on record their two salient characteristics, their apparent limitlessness and their deadly monotony. The first hour’s journey on any of the railways that run from Buenos Ayres is over an unbroken, expansive sea of green, the second hour is the same, and if you go travelling on until sundown, the same landscape will meet the eye. With certain necessary variations, Swinburne’s lines on the North Sea might be applied to the Pampas of the Argentine:
“Miles and miles, and miles of desolation!
Leagues on leagues on leagues without a change!
Sign or token of some oldest nation,
Here would make the strange land not so strange”;
or, as another poet has phrased it, the vast prairie seems:
“Almost as limitless as the unbounded sea, but without its changing smile.”
But the dweller in cities will not be depressed by this changelessness of landscape. He will rather welcome the escape from the congested haunts of man, drinking in with gusto the fresh clean air that has blown over countless leagues of grassland, and revel in the sense of liberty which comes when one stands in the great open spaces and vast solitudes of nature. If the unending sweep of green and the herds of innumerable cattle become oppressive, the eye can seek relief in following flights of hawks and other birds, or in searching for a clump