Chain of lakes—Size of lake—Sterility and fertility—Trips to Cordillera—Bones of dead game—Shores of lake—Western shore—Tracks in marshes—Northern shore—Rosy camp by Fenix—Guanaco hunt—Horses stray—Cordillera wolf—Vain search for huemul—Return to Horsham Camp—Trip to River Deseado—Paradise of wildfowl—Shooting ostriches—Long-necked game of Patagonia—No ruins or vestiges of older civilisation in Patagonia—Hunting mornings—Wounded guanaco—Indian trail—Trip to River de los Antiguos—Meet ostrich-hunter—Wandering Gauchos—Wanton burning of grass—Second visit to Rosy Camp—Flamingoes—Danger-signals—Scrivenor returns to Horsham Camp—River de los Antiguos.
At last we had arrived at Lake Buenos Aires, a time long looked forward to. The pampas were crossed and left behind, and the lower line of the Andes was reached, the foothills of the great range whose upper summits we had watched for weeks lying high on the sky-line, blue and white and cold, sending the message of a great wind from them to us. We were now upon the shores of the largest of the wonderful network of lakes and lagoons which stretches parallel with the Cordillera hundreds of miles to the southward, ending not far from the Straits of Magellan.
There was to me something infinitely romantic about Lake Buenos Aires. Its aspect was ever changing, and so often you came on a scene supremely beautiful. The wild light of sunset upon the snow-peaks, the grey turbulent water of the lake, and the bull-like wind charging down at us day after day—all these things gave the place an individuality of its own.
The lake is of considerable extent, measuring seventy-five miles in length from S.S.W. to N.N.E., and its waters wage a continual war upon the thorns and scrub growing upon the margin. Vast masses of milk-white timber, blanched by the influences of sun and water and eloquent of the mountain-land of forest whence they have been washed down, lie at the lip of the flood level. When I was there in the dry season the upper rim of timber was about 200 yards distant from the edge of the water.
INLET OF LAKE BUENOS AIRES
The sharp contrast of fertility and sterility that one meets with in Patagonia is remarkable, the more so as they often lie in close proximity the one to the other. I have mentioned an arid spread of yellow mud and stones cut up by deep gorges which we crossed before reaching the lake. I do not think that any painter desiring to picture desolation could do better than descend the central gorge and there paint its gaunt and rugged outlines, tumbled together in a horror of barrenness that the eyes ached to look upon. Yet close to this place, within ten yards of it, a neck of land displayed green scrub, ay, and flowers—beautiful purple sweet-pea-like flowers in profusion! And on the farther side was a green gully with two blue peaty waterholes.
Near by, as I have said, we established a base camp, from which we made four expeditions towards the Cordillera, which lie on the westward of the lake, while, singularly enough, the continental divide appears to be to the eastward of it. On our trips we took with us merely a horse apiece, and carried provisions on our saddles. Meantime the remainder of the troop, which had suffered somewhat on our journey from Bahia Camerones, were turned out to rest and luxuriate upon the marsh grass, that extended in a broad strip for a couple of miles under the ridge, while downhill from the camp towards the south this rich pantano spread still farther.
Around the lake lay piled the skulls and bones of dead game, guanaco and a few huemules. These animals come down to live on the lower ground and near unfrozen water during the cold season, and there, when the weather is particularly severe, they die in crowds. We saw their skeletons, in one or two places literally heaped one upon the other.