After having thus come to an agreement, the two bandits lighted their cigars, mounted on horseback, and took the road which would take them out of the wood, where this dark plot had just been conducted.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
ARNAL.
Several days had passed since that on which the two gauchos, after leaving the service of the young painter, had gone to ensconce themselves in the thicket, whither a sinister appointment called them. The Guaycurus had continued their journey with that extraordinary rapidity which is a characteristic of the Indians.
We now find them camped in an immense plain, concealed in the midst of an immense forest, the trees of which—a century old—form round them walls of verdure, through which it is impossible for the eye to pierce.
This plain—an advanced post, as it were, of the great chaco, that trackless desert which is the unexplored refuge of the Indian bravos who flee from civilisation—forms a part of the llano de Manso, in the fictitious province of Yapizlaga. We say fictitious, and intentionally; for since its discovery, if the Europeans have succeeded in giving a name to this part of the American territory, they have certainly never succeeded in building towns there, though they have established missions.
This territory is really the sacred soil of the aboriginal Americans; they alone inhabit it, and traverse it in every direction. Even at the present day the whites only find in this immense valley a miserable death, after horrible sufferings, and their whitened bones,-scattered in every direction, appear to warn those whom a mad folly may induce to follow in the same traces, that such is the fate which attends them in this inhospitable region.
But the llano de Manso is not, as might be supposed, a sterile plain like the Pampas of Buenos Aires, or a desolate desert like the Sahara. No country in the world, perhaps, possesses a more luxuriant vegetation, more verdant banks, or forests more woody, or better stocked with game of all sorts. Several rivers, and some of them of considerable importance, wind their sinewy course through the llano (plain) which they fertilise. Of these streams the principal is the Rio Tarifa, an affluent of the Rio Bermejo, which itself is an affluent of the Rio Paraguay, and the Rio Pilcomayo, which, after traversing the llano for its entire length, loses itself in the Rio Paraguay by three embouchures. All these rivers—at first torrents—descend the Cordilleras; their picturesque banks are often inundated to a distance of two or three leagues in the rainy season and then the llano, the low vegetation of which almost entirely disappears under the water, assumes a strange and fantastic appearance.