I fell asleep toward dawn on a cot set out in the breeze, to the rattle of poker-chips, the clinking of bottles and glasses, and cries of “One hundred dollars!” “Two hundred and fifty!” from the “office” in which the gringo community had gathered. Next evening a local train set me down in the heavy darkness at Villa Encarnación, up to a few months before the halting-place for the night of the “Internacional.” In name one of the six “cities” of Paraguay, the place was a drowsy, barefoot, isolated cluster of buildings, rather than a town. Strewn along the side of a red hill, amid half-luxuriant vegetation, on the banks of the Paraná, the southern boundary of Paraguay, it covered a considerable space of rolling, grassy ground, with wide paths of reddish sand where streets should have been. Its slight commerce was chiefly in the hands of Germans. It was humid with the rainy season, and insolent with its big ragged garrison. Green parrots screamed in and out of the orange-groves, the fruit of which was green in color even when ripe and of rather acid taste. Across the Paraná, as wide as the Hudson, Posadas, in the Argentine, lay banked up on the sloping opposite shore, in plain sight from any part of the town.
Life is free and easy in Paraguay, close to nature. Its women, in their loose gowns and bare feet, very erect from the practice of carrying loads on their heads from childhood, have a childlike simplicity, as well as an extremely graceful carriage. Yet I found this the least interesting of South American countries. Its old missions, to the ruined churches of which, overgrown with creepers, a ride of a day or two from the railroad at almost any point brings one, attract many travelers; but I had already seen these and better in tropical Bolivia. With its education at a low ebb, chiefly in the hands of priests to whom sacred history and catechisms are the sum total of wisdom, the present inhabitants of Paraguay leave the impression of being incapable of much advancement.
The change from this languid little country to the live one across the river was almost startling. When the sun had declined somewhat, a motor-boat chugged across to Posadas with a score of passengers, where we landed without ceremony among a group of Argentine officials, well-dressed and courteously business-like. To those coming upon it from the direction of Buenos Aires, Posadas may seem small and backward; in contrast with the drowsy, little grass-grown Paraguayan “city” still in plain sight across the Paraná, it is very much alive. The capital of the territory of Misiones, that tongue of land piercing far up between Brazil and Paraguay and taking its name from the Jesuit establishments of olden times, it already boasts some ten thousand inhabitants, or more than the entire territory contained ten years ago. In spite of being tolerably compact and two-storied in the business section, the town covers a vast amount of ground, with very wide streets and ample elbow-room everywhere, except in the clustered shacks of laborers along the river-brink. A single church, its old red-brick tower still unfinished, rather Protestant than Catholic in appearance, by reason of the simplicity of its adornments and the existence of seats within, takes the place of the score or more that would bulk above a town of similar size in the Andes. Here were hard-paved streets instead of sand-holes, steam road-rollers and up-to-date machinery, business activity and shoes, well-kept parks with plenty of benches, large, prominent buildings as schools—just opening for the new year in this first week in March—and well-dressed policemen of manly demeanor. Canvas cots had taken the place of hammocks. Boys were busy polishing brass name-plates before important business houses. The red liberty-cap now adorned all government shields, while the most beautiful flag of South America, the Argentinian white and sky-blue, flew at the crest of many a façade. Here a stranger could pass in the streets without being stared out of countenance. The inhabitants had a look of eagerness and hope in their faces, signs of at least a material prosperity in striking contrast to the dreary hopelessness of Andean regions. Yet Posadas is not forty years old, while Encarnación, across the river, was founded by the Jesuits more than three centuries ago.
In the second-class car of the N.E.A., the “Nord Este Argentino,” there were no Indian passengers, and though only a mixto, the train made good progress. At the very first farm outside Posadas an American binder was felling the autumn grain—and I had not seen so much as a mower since crossing the Rio Grande thirty months before. At every station were uniformed police; mounted, officers patroled the country roads. Houses along the way were not the dens of human animals, but were supplied with the comforts of home, even American rocking-chairs tucked away in the shade of their verandas. I had come to the end of the great South American monte and jungle, and from now on the great Argentine pampas grew ever broader, slightly rolling here, stretching away to infinity on each hand. The brick-red soil of Misiones was given over to grazing rather than to agriculture, though we passed long autumn-dry corn-fields, the ears broken half off and hanging over to ripen. Cattle were everywhere, and cow-boys were roping them here and there, while gauchos careered across the broad plains on their hardy pintos. The railroad and all its appurtenances were just as orderly as they would have been in England, the railway architecture of which it resembled, though the cars were of the American style. Everything from engine to yards was so English one felt sure that, had they spoken their language, the traincrews would have called the little four-wheeled freight-cars “goods-vans,” and spoken of “metals” and “sleepers.”
The mixture of types in the Argentine,—a native gaucho in bombachos and a Basque immigrant from the Pyrenees
It was some time after dark that we pulled into Santo Tomé, or at least into a station bearing that name, and I concluded that I had ridden far enough for the time being. The train did not enter the town, perhaps because it would have been hard to decide just where the town was. In the Argentine these are scattered over a vast amount of ground, in striking contrast to the heaped-up crowding common to the Andes. A half-moon dim-lighted the flat country far and wide. I set out in the moonlight along a broad highway, and wandered until any hope of finding a town died out; then ran upon a few low, scattered houses that suggested some insignificant village, like Bolivia’s tropical “cities”; then I went on and on until there grew up about me an immense town, never crowded together, yet with an enormous plaza, long stretches of electric arc-lamps, a checkerboard city of wide streets and long blocks, each house set in its own big garden, a town well-to-do, citified, with many automobiles, and but a single church, of moderate size and inconspicuous.
Life began to renew about the station at 3 A.M. The restaurant opened, watchmen lighted big gasoline arc-lamps, the “International” rolled in, and we were off again, with ample room even in the second-class car. Three hours later I sat up to watch the sun rise red out of Uruguay, across the river. About the vast, long-haired, unkempt plains stood clumps of pampa trees; at the towns were many gay with blossoms—spring blossoms, I had almost written, until I remembered it was autumn. The aloncita, a bird not unlike a small robin in appearance, though with less red, began to build its beehive-shaped mud nest on the wooden cross-pieces of the telegraph-poles. All day long, for hundreds of miles, there was an average of a nest on every third pole, always on the side farthest from the railroad, as if the noise of the trains were annoying to its inhabitants, the arched doorway always toward the direction from which we came—the north—to catch, perhaps, the warmer breezes. Among hundreds of nests I saw only three or four exceptions to this, and all day long only one built anywhere else than on the cross-piece, close against the pole. One daring architect had set his on the top of the pole itself, neatly capping it. As this particular pole had its cross-piece already occupied, it looked as if the bird above was a hard-headed fellow who had failed to stake his claim in time, but who insisted, nevertheless, on living in that particular spot.
The country grew more and more like our own, in climate, creature comforts, news-stands, block-signals, uniformed mailmen, carts and wagons, some of them of the boat-shaped style of Poland, rattling past on broad highways, busy towns along the way, at only the more important of which the train halted briefly, and between them raced swiftly and smoothly southward. Through the windows the horizon of the great rolling pampa continually rose and fell. Sometimes it was punctuated with a grove of trees, more rarely with a small forest, the chiefly unfenced plains everywhere sprinkled with cattle. Here and there a ñandu, the South American ostrich, trotted awkwardly away across the prairie. Where there were fences, the wires ran through the posts by holes bored in them, rather than being secured by staples. Well-tended fields of fruit-trees in long rows seemed incongruous in South America; it brought a feeling of satisfaction to see industry and decent living again, things being done, instead of merely doing themselves. Some industrious country boys climbed a fence with bags of large, juicy watermelons for sale; boys merely in quest of pocket-money and not because their livelihood depended upon it. The population at large was too busy to bother with station hawking. Countrymen wore bombachos, enormous bloomer-like trousers, tucked into soft top-boots or drawn up about the bare ankles above their alpargatas, or hempen soles, as if the cost of cloth were of no importance. Any lady would have remained ladylike in them. Now and then the river drew up so close beside us that we could look far off across Uruguay, spread out on the other side.
At length we sighted ahead, a sort of oriental mist hovering about it, a whitish city with a two-tower church suggesting minarets, a city set on a knoll, not unlike Jerusalem. Yet this was not the town we were approaching, but Salto, in the “República Oriental” over the river. Great fields of grapes, well tended, began to race by us, suburban houses thickened, and we drew up at the in-all-respects-complete city of Concordia, four hundred miles south of Posadas on the frontier I had left twenty-four hours before. In the Andes, world-famous cities had been mere languid villages; in the Argentine, places the world at large had never heard of were large, flourishing metropolises. Concordia numbers twenty thousand inhabitants, virtually all white and all alive. Yet it is not even the capital, but merely the second city of the Province of the Entre Rios—“Between the Rivers” Paraná and Uruguay, famous for its saladerías, or beef-salting establishments. Well spread out, it has few churches and no over-supply of priests, the former with few bells and those of agreeable tone, which are rung, not too often, instead of being beaten with an infernal din. Liquor-shops are few; the majority of the population finds something more worth while than shopkeeping. Its inhabitants know how to pass two abreast on the sidewalks; women on bicycles bring a frequent start of surprise; swarms of cleanly dressed boys and girls sally forth from big, well-equipped schools, where coeducation reigns; bootblacks clad like business men and carrying upholstered and decorated seats seek their clients in the well-kept streets and plazas; electric street-cars give excellent service. Electric lights both in streets and houses were even more brilliant than our own; the public library was actually open and “functioning,” and did hot spend its time staring at the foreigner who had come to read. In the “Hotel Garabaldi”—just such a place as the name implies—wine was served with meals as freely as in Europe, and though only the abode of workingmen, it was superior to the best hostelry of Andean cities. Real beds had now taken the place of canvas cots; at the rear was an electric-lighted cancha de bochas, or outdoor bowling alley for the clientèle of Italian workmen.