The “International” train leaves Asunción every Wednesday and Saturday morning, and lands the traveler in Montevideo or Buenos Aires fifty hours later. The through and local fares vary greatly, the former being subjected to the competition of the river steamers. First and second-class rates to Buenos Aires are $450 and $325 respectively; local fares are $680 and $460! Luckily, this is in Paraguayan currency; but even when turned into real money, it remains a respectable rate. For half a day we steamed across broad pampas, almost prairies, backed by wooded ridges, isolated masses of dark rock standing forth here and there in the middle distance, dim outlines of low mountains hovering on the horizon. The broad savannas were speckled with cattle, somewhat gaunt, but of vastly better stock than those of the Andes, a bulky China bull here and there explaining the improvement.
A view from the promenade-deck of the steamer of cowboys of Paraguay slaughtering our day’s beefsteak on the bank of the river
A Paraguayan landscape, with native cart, the tall tough grass, and the tacurús, or ant-hills, that abound in this region
Every man on the train was armed, the weapons varying from flint-lock, muzzle-loading horse-pistols to the very latest automatic. The revolver is a sign of caste in Paraguay; my companions accepted me as one of them only when I had shown my own. When the conductor came through for tickets, his friends and acquaintances playfully pointed their weapons at him. The faces of many, even youthful, men were scarred from the latest revolution, like the battered façades of Asunción. Every native aboard,—women, children, the train-crew, even the train-guard in his white uniform and helmet—smoked big, black cigars, which are really nothing more than the blackened natural leaf rolled up in cigar form. Brown maidens, physically not unattractive, sat with a half-smoked stogy in a corner of their mouths, and now and then spat through their teeth like New York toughs. The cigarette, all but universal elsewhere on my journey, finds slight favor in Paraguay. At the stations, peons in baggy chiripás mingled with estancieros, their neck-high trousers tucked into soft leather boots, a silver-headed rebenque, or short riding-whip, hanging from their wrists by a leather thong. Women squatted on the brick flaggings, selling anything from raw beefsteaks to the native fire-water. Though there were many stations, the towns were rarely visible, except a single church-tower marking the site some distance off. Being built on knolls, the expense of entering them has been avoided by the railway constructors. The few that were seen were triste at best, the populations, lolling about the openings that serve as doors, ragged and ambitionless. At Loque station, women wearing from ten to fifty coarse straw hats each, languidly offered them for sale. At Patiño a crude tramway was waiting to carry to the bank of the river the passengers for San Bernadino, Paraguay’s “watering-place,” on the beautiful fresh-water lake of Ypacarai. Then came Paraguari, famous for its revolutions, commercial center of all the old missions for a hundred miles around, leaf-roofed, two-wheel carts awaiting freight or passengers. Seventy-five miles from the capital we skirted Villa Rica, second city of the Inland Republic, with a commerce in tobacco, sugar, and lumber, but a mere village in all but name.
At the small prairie station of Borja, from which some fellow-countrymen were constructing a branch line some day to reach the Iguazú Falls, I abandoned the “International,” and was soon speeding away across the flat country in a track automobile. At best the Paraguyan landscape is monotonous, vast plains of reddish soil and coarse grass stretching away until lost to view, here and there broken by thick clumps of forest. Ever and again we were slowed down or halted by reddish half-wild cattle on the unfenced track; the pampa was sprinkled with them as far as the eye could see. The plains either are, or are fancied to be, of no value for agriculture, and are left to grazing, while the languid natives, swinging in their hammocks under their wall-less roofs in the edges of the forest clumps, raised a bit of corn and tobacco in plantations hacked out of the woods, and trusted Providence for the rest. Ponderous, springless, two-wheeled ox-carts that seemed all wheels labored by. Everywhere the tacurú, or cone-shaped ant-hills, stood head-high in the tall grass. My companions told of tacurús erected during a single night in the middle of earth-floored dwellings and requiring the exertions of a band of workmen to dig them out.
At length we drew up before the rough-board headquarters at Charaná. It being Saturday evening, the entire region, men, women, and children, proposed to ride into Borja on the work-train, to squander their month’s wages and remain several days drunk. The young American superintendent, however, issued orders to the Paraguayan soldiers that had been assigned him, and though these looked anything but fierce in their ragged khaki and bare feet, the throng lost no time in obeying their orders to disembark. For all their childlike demeanor, the soldiers of Paraguay have a reputation for shooting on scant provocation.
We pushed on along battered old rails, through forest and jungle, with here and there a bank of red clay, some ten miles to railhead, the line squirming its way around every knoll, the cheap engines to be employed requiring that there be nothing steeper than a one percent grade. Advance gangs had hacked out a cart-road for some distance beyond, where the territory was growing so dense-wooded and hilly that the superintendent was considering the use of balloons to survey the country.
Back at the main camp I had my first mate, or “Paraguayan tea.” The yerba mate is to the life of Paraguay and its adjoining regions what coca leaves are to the Andes. In the yerbales the leaves and smaller branches of an evergreen bush not unlike the holly, growing among taller trees, are spread on a raised platform of poles, smoked and dried, forced through to the earth floor beneath, beaten almost to a powder with clubs, and packed in tercios by sewing up green ox-hides, which shrink until the contents is stone-hard. The gringo engineers had come to prefer this native beverage to coffee or tea, though they drank it in cups, with sugar and milk. The native way is to put a spoonful of the powdered yerba in a little pear-shaped gourd, pour this full of boiling water, and suck the “tea” through a brass or silver tube, or in the case of the poorer people, a reed. One spoonful suffices for a score of persons, the gourd being passed from one to another of a group, each time being refilled with water, the drinker taking care not to burn hands or lips on gourd or tube. To any but a foreigner it would be an insult to offer a separate bowl. The greenish liquid was bitter in taste and by no means pleasant, but was due in time to become my favorite beverage, as it does with most gringos who continue the use of it. Everywhere in this region one runs upon natives loafing in the shade, a mate-gourd, sometimes carved with fantastic figures, grasped in one hand, lazily imbibing the liquid at regular intervals. Unlike the coca, it has no narcotic effect; it is, on the contrary, beneficial in stomachic ailments. The gaucho of the pampas makes it serve as bread and vegetables in his fixed diet of asado con cuero, or beef roasted in the hide. Many an attempt has been made to introduce mate to the rest of the world, so far, unfortunately, in vain.