The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

The sun was radiant when, a little after seven, we steamed out of Mendoza station and crept in among the verdant foothills of the Andes, where all around us were signs of vegetation and natural conditions utterly distinct from those of the Atlantic side. There was a bracing touch of cold in the morning air, and yet a feeling that here was the most delightful of climates, with sunny slopes where the grapes ripened in far-spreading vineyards, the sight of which transported one at once to the pleasant land of France, and I can imagine that the many French settlers who have come to Mendoza, attracted by the great and growing wine trade of the town and district, will often have the illusion that they are still at home.

The railway, all the way from Mendoza almost to the Pacific, follows the course of rivers, which at first run eastward from the watershed of the mountain frontier and then westward to the ocean. The scenery is by no means sensational in its beauty, as the train threads its way among the gentler valleys watered by the River Mendoza for some forty or fifty kilometres westward of the city. But as the ascent becomes more precipitous and the clatter of the rack and pinion slackens to the slowest of tunes, while the engine crawls, with much puffing, laboriously upwards, the panorama of the mountain heights grows very beautiful, and unlike most mountain scenery of Europe.

Wild and barren are the hills, and lifeless and dead they seem, for rarely does a bird flit across the scene, and few cattle or sheep find pasturage after we have passed the junction of the Rivers Mendoza and Uspallata, between forty and fifty miles westward of Mendoza. There is a great stillness among these mountains, a feeling of cold and cheerless solitude. Here we are among the waste places of the earth, and yet they lack the Dantesque majesty of rugged grandeur and fantastic outline, having instead a certain rhythmic monotony of form, varied only by their extraordinary and sensational colouring. Great patches of heliotrope and purple, long zigzag streaks of green, immense blotches of yellow—vivid as mustard—bright spots here and there of red and gleaming blue, and large tracts of oily black—such are the colours I recall among these gigantic volcanic masses, where an almost endless variety of mineral substances give these unfamiliar tints to the treeless and grassless heights. Sometimes, indeed, I found that what looked like a great patch of sulphur, on nearer approach proved to be a thin yellow grass, upon which those strange animals, the llamas, are able to feed, and it was, I think, at the station of Zanjon Amarillo, where we had reached a height of some 7,350 feet, that I first saw two or three of these quaint beasts of burden, who stopped cropping this scanty herbage to gaze at the train with their questioning eyes, in which there is always a suggestion of indignation.

These wayside stations, of which there are many on the route, are almost the only signs of habitation, and it is difficult to imagine that anywhere among those forbidding hills human beings are so luckless as to have their homes. Everybody at the station seemed to be shivering with cold, as the bright sunlit sky of the morning was now, in the early afternoon, glooming over with grey, foreboding a snow-storm, and I thought I had never seen anything more charged with melancholy than the little plot of graves beside the station of Zanjon Amarillo. Some dozens of tiny, wooden crosses and withered wreaths decorated this loneliest of cemeteries. I suppose most of them who were sleeping their last sleep alongside this lone little railway station had been employed in the making of the line, for there is surely naught else but the making and maintenance of the railway to inhabit these cheerless wastes.

From time to time, of course, little groups of prospectors are wandering among the mountains, looking for favourable spots where mining may be attempted, but so far that industry in this region is of the slightest. We carried with us in our train a number of young Englishmen employed as sectional superintendents of the line, who had been on a visit to Buenos Ayres, and at various points they were dropped off, with much hand-shaking and good wishes, to begin another spell of lonesome, but, perhaps, not uninteresting work. Their conversation touched the varying merits of certain distances which ought to be allowed between the telegraph posts, and it was surprising to learn how greatly opinions could differ on that subject.

As we approach Punta de las Vacas, a few miles beyond Zanjon Amarillo, the ascent suddenly stiffens, and the railway now performs the characteristic corkscrew journey of all Alpine lines. This station is at the junction of the Cow River (Rio de las Vacas) with the Mendoza, but whence the name of the former I cannot guess, for it seemed a region where vacas would fare badly. Southward we had now a view of the volcano Tupungato, but when we had laboriously climbed another twelve or thirteen miles to Puente del Inca, we were just in time to see, away to the north, the summit of Aconcagua, the monarch of the Andes, being blotted out in a snow-storm, which in a few minutes more was upon us, quickly filling the empty barrows about the station with whitest flakes and enticing most of the passengers to engage in the primitive pastime of snow-balling. At this point, 9,000 feet above sea level, where there is quite a good hotel, with thermal baths that attract many visitors in the summer time, we find one of the few curiosities of the route, a natural bridge of volcanic matter, over the stream, but I imagine he was a lonely Inca who gave his name to it, as this is surely the farthest limit to which Inca civilisation reached southward from Peru and Bolivia.

The train now continued its journey through a white world, the Andes had disappeared as if by magic. Snow and white sky everywhere, so that it strained the eyes to look out of the window, and the increasing cold made us don our thickest wraps and muffle up, while the rarefied air began to make breathing somewhat difficult. Along the route it was strange to pass, every little way, an Indian railway labourer, standing at times on the very edge of a precipice that swept downwards into the mysterious white depths beneath, and holding in his hand the spade with which he had been at work on the approach of the train, or perhaps a signal flag with which he had indicated that all was clear at some dangerous corner, but invariably looking entirely resigned to the fate that had cast him thus to labour for the scantiest fare in these upland wastes, where, by the railway side, we passed from time to time the rude huts in which the Indian peones huddled like animals.

I remember that the station at Las Cuevas presented quite a lively scene, a number of railway engineers and officials, wearing their thick ponchos, having come out to the verandas of their wooden houses, which stand back some short distance from the station and are connected therewith by a wooden bridge. I felt that if one had any particular desire to pit himself against the primal forces of nature and the rude red life of savage things, here was the station to get off at, 10,500 feet above sea level, but I was glad to stay in the train and to pull my travelling rugs the closer around me as it panted still upward, and presently entered the famous tunnel which penetrates the summit of the Cordillera Principal, precisely where the frontier line runs between the Argentine and Chili.

When we emerged on the other side and immediately began to descend, we had bid good-bye to Argentina, and one of the strangest and most moving scenes I have ever witnessed presented itself. We came out upon a colossal amphitheatre, from which, to the northwest, the mountain swept down from the Inca’s Lake—seen dimly through the driving sleet and snow on our right—into a white mysterious abyss some two thousand feet below, where dark objects such as the rocky shoulders of lower hills, seemed to be floating in an eerie sea of vapour. The snow storm had lessened and was turning now to rain, but the scene was awesome in its effect upon the observer descending these uncanny slopes into this vague new land.