I slipped across the river next afternoon to Salto, in Uruguay, adding another country to my growing collection. One went and came freely; without frontier formalities. Salto is large, and several times older than Concordia, with many well-built buildings, yet with a suggestion of “seediness,” a bit more squalor and barefootedness, its church not so imposing and well-kept as it looks at a distance, its policemen in rather shiny and threadbare uniforms, its streets cobbled, rather than smoothly paved. In short, it is more Spanish in type, more clustered together, with a general air suggesting that this is not quite so live and hopeful a country as that over the river. Many proud old families live here; yet the head of more than one of them slips across daily to do business in the Argentine.
One can go on from Concordia to Buenos Aires by rail, but I chose to take the overnight journey on a big Mihanovich river-steamer, with all the conveniences of an ocean liner. The flat, sometimes rolling, occasionally bushy shores of the Uruguay were broken by several towns, notably the two model establishments producing Leibig’s extract of beef. When I returned on deck next morning a brilliant sun was pouring its rays blindingly over the stream misnamed the Plata, the “River of Silver,” by Sebastian “Gaboto”—who was none other than our own Sebastian Cabot—because he fancied it ran uphill to the silver mines of Peru. The Indians called it the Paraná-Guazú, the “River Large as a Sea,” a truer name, for on the right it stretched away to the dimmest of broken land forms, and soon these, too, disappeared, and a reddish-brown sea spread unbroken to the horizon. For a time we hugged the Uruguayan shore, then swung the blazing sun around behind us and struck out for what, but for its color, might have been the open sea. Soon we began to pass buoys of the Argentine government, marked “R. A. m. o. p.,” with the kilometers to the end of my journey painted upon them. Toward eight, where the yellow sea and the bluish-gray sky met, the vast, perfect circle of the horizon was broken by a patch of faint white. It was only a tiny narrow line down at the extreme edge of the great inverted bowl of sky above us, yet so long—several inches, in fact—that should it turn out to be a city, as I began to suspect, since we were headed directly for it, it would be a large one indeed. Then the white patch began to take on faint individual shape, and above us the wireless was spitting its message to the yet invisible world ahead. An hour later we were in the midst of buoys, large and small, marking the “Canal Sur,” or South Channel. Boats and steamers appeared, and sailing vessels spread their white wings across the yellow waters on all sides of us, while the city stretched along the horizon ahead had turned from white to gray, with a tint of red, neither color nor edifice conspicuous, except for two groups of huge brick smoke-stacks belching forth into the brilliant sky. Even after the long line of buildings had taken on definite form, and one could all but count their windows, the city seemed still to sit on the yellow sea. One was struck, too, by the narrowness of the strip; the buildings seemed for the most part a bare four stories, with only here and there one as high as ten cutting into the landless sky-line. Two tugs took possession of us, dragging us up a narrow channel through a wilderness of shipping, where we must soon stop for lack of space, until we spied an unoccupied bit of wharf and warped gradually into it. It was a late-summer morning, the ninth of March. While the rest waited for their baggage to be examined, an official glanced at my bundle, jerked a thumb scornfully over a shoulder, and I stepped out into the metropolitan rumble of—no wonder gringo residents have abbreviated it to “B.A.”—“la Ciudad y Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
- Changed “I am not of that kidney” to “I am not of that kind” on p. [48].
- Changed “going a journey” to “going on a journey” on p. [167].
- Silently corrected typographical errors.
- Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.