On this day (the 25th) we pushed on to the Sub-prefecto's estancia. It consisted of the usual corrugated iron shanty and barn. We marched on the following morning and reached La Ultima Casa, where we were hospitably entertained by Mrs. Hardy. She was indeed very kind. Her husband had been an Englishman, but she herself was an Argentine. It is certainly a fact in Patagonia that the Argentines are far more ready to show hospitality than are our own countrymen. One hardly wonders, however, at people being a little cautious and suspicious, as the wayfarer is not always a wandering angel in Patagonia, or, for that matter, in any thinly populated country that is being newly opened up. Therefore we were the more grateful to our hostess of La Ultima Casa. At the shanty of another farmer, a Scotchman, we had had the door bolted against us, and been told to await his home-coming if we wished to enter the house.
We ate our meal at Mrs. Hardy's sitting on up-turned boxes, and she brought out some magazines for our reading. Hers was a strange existence, poor old lady! She appeared to be regarded or—it comes to the same thing—thought she was regarded a little in the light of an Ishmaelite by her neighbours, who were trying (she told me) to acquire her land. Her position did not seem to be prosperous. The casa had the usual corrugated roof, and her one window could boast no glass. From this main building a sort of barn jutted out to the left. Later on, I decided that this annex, which I at first took to be a barn, must be the old lady's private sanctum, for from it she produced five magazines, some lions' claws, a skunk-skin rug, some hen's eggs, and the hen herself. A regular widow's cruse of a place. The blackened roof of the kitchen was supported by four beams lengthways and four across, these last shiny as if tarred with the smoke of many winters. An old step-ladder in the corner answered the uses of a cupboard, cups and so forth being kept on a couple of wooden shelves, and lumps of sheep's fat decorated the room. We sat on the old wooden bedstead with its pile of sheepskins for bed-clothes and wrote our diary. Our hostess, who wore her hair in two plaits hanging down at each side of her face, sat on a case and talked while she drank the inevitable maté through a bombilla. She asked us to remain over a second day, which was most good of her, but we had to continue our journey.
We marched until about three o'clock, when, coming up to an empty shanty, we took shelter in it for a while, as it happened to be very hot. Later we started again, and made a long march across a pampa above the cañadon of the Santa Cruz, which is here two miles or more in breadth. Speaking of this cañadon, I cannot do better than give Darwin's words: "This valley varies from five to ten miles in breadth: it is bounded by step-formed terraces, which rise in most parts one above the other to the height of 500 feet, and have on the opposite sides a remarkable correspondence."
The river winds considerably as it flows through the cañadon, the sides of which are very bare and grassless, excepting where springs break through and flow down the cliff-side, their course being marked by a line of vivid green. The pampa above, along which we travelled, was made up of bare yellow levels, broken here and there by strips and patches of a very dark green bush, so dark as to seem almost black. We found a good deal of difficulty in getting to a camp with water, as the pampa was very dry, so we prolonged our march till 7.15 P.M., when we came upon a shallow and turbid stream running down in a southerly direction from the barranca. In the end we had to descend into the cañadon of the river. Not far from the spot which we chose for camping lay the bodies of some eighty guanaco with their skins on, which had died during the previous winter.
The landscape immediately on the banks of the Santa Cruz is arid and hopeless in the extreme, but one can never forget the glory of Patagonia, its wonderful sunsets, which gleam out over the dull-hued empty wastes in a splendour of colour. So on that night as I stood in the shadow that steeped all my side of the river, the other bank was lit up with a translucent glow of sunset as delicately yellow as if it shone through the petals of a buttercup.
On January 27 we started along the cañadon, which continued to be desolate and rather stony. We saw many guanaco, living and dead. After a time we made for the pampa above, from where we looked once again upon the Cordillera, gleaming very dim and faint on the horizon. Finding a lagoon with some grass about it, we off-saddled for an hour. Later we marched on rather more slowly than usual, and camped in such a place as a wildfowler might see in dreams of the night. A lagoon of sword-blue water, but in shape like an arrowhead, rimmed in with low green rushes, above these yellow tussocks of coarse grass bending in the wind, behind all a bare promontory arched over by a sad evening sky. On the breeze came the "Honk, honk" of geese mixed with the thinner notes of snipe. Ducks, too, were there, and the snipe in wisps of thirty. Presently, as I sat writing, a guanaco came in sight, and later a flock of cayenne lapwings (Vanellus cayennensis). I might have been, as far as the aspect of things was concerned (save for the guanaco) in Uist and going home to a warm fireside, instead of journeying on and on for many days and weeks to come over the endless pampa and into the distant Cordillera.
The Drinking-place.
At this lagoon also I saw a condor (Sarcorhampus gryphus), and before this had seen a couple when at Mrs. Hardy's. It must have been near this spot that Darwin shot his condor, which he speaks of as measuring eight and a half feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, and four feet from head to tail.