The 20,000 miles of railway run through most of the flat fertile areas, and the ordinary traveller comes away with the idea it is one of the most level, featureless countries he has ever been in. The old settlers had the same idea, for their description pampa applied to a boundless stretch. You can journey for hundreds of miles and never see a tree. But up in the north, under the shadow of Brazil, are great forests which will be made useful to the world one of these days. Then you get the backbone of the continent in the west, the Andes with Aconcagua rising to 23,000 feet above sea level. In the middle land is the fruitful Argentine Mesapotamia. In the far south is the last word of desolation, the Patagonian wilderness.
Argentina has several navigable rivers, and two, the Plate and the Parana, up which it is possible, for light draft steamers, at any rate, to go hundreds of miles. If one pretends there is no Amazon in existence the Plate discharges more water into the ocean than any river from Hudson's Bay to the Magellan Straits. A learned book informs me that the volume of water rolled into the ocean is 2,150,000 cubic feet per second, which seems "prodigious." At Monte Video the width of the river is sixty-two miles; so it is no trifling creek. The Plate is the muddiest stream I have ever come across. This is not to be wondered at, considering that it and its tributaries scour many thousands of miles. As a matter of fact, the estuary is being filled up. Within knowledge, the depth opposite Monte Video has lessened by fifteen feet, and though dredgers are constantly at work, big liners moving up to Buenos Aires have sometimes to force a way through two feet of mud. It is quite likely that in the fullness of time Buenos Aires will not be a port, but an inland town.
Sometimes Argentina has floods which ruin the crops, drown thousands of cattle, break the railway banks, and reduce strong men, who thought they were rich, to tears at the prospect of poverty. Or there are droughts which shrivel everything up. Away back in the 'thirties, Buenos Aires Province had a drought which lasted for five years. Scientists, who know all about these things, say that the rainless zones are extending, and that in the far future the whole Republic will be a rainless zone, and umbrella sellers will go into the bankruptcy court. The prospect is not immediate, and if we are wise we shall not worry over a trouble which may have to be faced five hundred years hence.
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Photograph by J. W. Boote & Co., Buenos Aires. OX-CARTS IN THE ARGENTINE. The long pole in the man's hand is an ox-goad. |
Considering you can get a sweep of level country for 2,000 miles, with scarcely a hill that would make a decent bunker, when a gale gets on the rampage it runs away with itself. There is the zonda, which so disturbs the elements that the thermometer jumps fifty degrees in about as many minutes. Then, although there are those millions of cubic feet of water emptying itself out of the Plate, there comes the suestadas, which blows so hard that the water cannot get into the ocean, and, as a result, the upper streams rise and tumble over their banks. Next there are the pamperos on the plains, which either grill you with their heat or give you a chill from their rawness. I did not suffer myself; but these hateful pamperos are so charged with electricity that they give you a shock which produces a sort of paralysis, "perhaps twisting up a corner of the mouth, or half closing one eye, or causing a sudden swelling of the neck," as one authority records.
Parts of the Republic are yet to be explored. Persistent man is having a rough time in the Chaco region. When our ancestors invented hell they had no knowledge of the Chaco. It is all swamp and forest, and mammoth mosquitoes and fever, and pestiferous Indians who do not like the white man, and put a spear into his back whenever they get the chance. The Chaco Indians are amongst the few of their race who have not been subjugated. There are rivers which come trailing from goodness knows where; but when they reach the Chaco they are evidently so disgusted that they burrow underground. When it rains, fish several inches long drop from the clouds. Under a torrent a dip in the ground will become a pool, and in it will be found fish a foot long. They do not drop from the clouds. There are no little streams by which they can have arrived. Where do they come from? The easiest explanation offered is that they were formerly much smaller, did arrive on a storm cloud, and have been lying in the mud since the last storm.