“Curious,” I mused, “but as I came in I noticed just outside the gates four beggars,—a blind woman, a one-legged man, a man without legs, and a paralytic.”
“Ah, esa gente! That class of people!” cried the warden, with a world of disgust in his voice and a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders.
CHAPTER IV
OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE
It was with keen regret that I cut myself off from Uncle Sam’s modest bounty when the time came to set out on a journey that was to carry me outside the Argentine and beyond the jurisdiction of our overworked consulate. But with a handful of gold sovereigns to show for my exertions in running errands and eluding Porteño prices, the day seemed at hand for continuing my intensive tour of South America. The “International,” of the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” leaves the capital three times a week on what purports to be a trip clear across the continent. In spirit its assertion is truthful, for though the “International” itself halts where the Argentine begins to tilt up into the Andes, other trains connect with it and one can, with good luck and ample wealth, reach Santiago de Chile, or Valparaiso on the Pacific, thirty-six hours after bidding the Porteños farewell.
On a crisp May morning I set out westward from “B.A.,” lying featureless and yellow-white in the brilliant early-winter sunshine, not a church spire, scarcely a factory chimney, though many unsightly American windmills, rising above its monotonous level. The heavy “limited” train made scarcely half a dozen stops all day, though no extraordinary speed. At the rare stations a few passengers hastened to enter or leave the cars; between them trees and windmills rose or receded hull-down over the horizon of the dreary pampas. Outside each uninspiring town was an ostentatious city of the dead; in the sodden fields were flocks of sheep, cattle, and horses, fat as barrels, some snorting away at sight of the train, others gazing disdainfully after it. In many places the pampa was flooded, sometimes for miles, the shallow temporary lakes dotted with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud, with only the tops of the fence-posts out of water, in which dismal looking animals were huddled up to their bellies, or crowded together on little muddy islands. Many mud houses were half under water, their thatched roofs and adobe walls turned into velvety green lawns; hay-stacks had grown verdant with sprouting grass; several pairs of horses dragging along the churned roads a load of baled alfalfa was one of the rare signs of activity. Even the ñandúes seemed to have fled to some modern Ararat.
A woman of Córdoba, mate bowl in hand
Even a lady would not look unladylike in the bombachas of southeastern South America
