The Amazing Argentine: A New Land of Enterprise

by John Foster Fraser

There is an agricultural college, a wonderful drive up a hill to a park which provides long distance views, an English school and a German school. I could easily give a dozen places where these developments can be found, and better. The point is that you find these things at all in the very heart of South America. Being the heart of the southern continent, Cordoba has been selected by the Government as its chief observatory. It is the Argentine Greenwich. The Republic keeps the same time from east to west, and it keeps Cordoba time. The observatory is under the control of a staff from the United States.

The Cordobians are great lovers of pleasure. Sometimes on the grim hoardings of London you see how a railway company will take you, first class, to a popular seaside resort, house and feed you in a well-known hotel, and bring you back at a fixed inclusive sum for the week-end. The Central Argentine Railway does the same thing in regard to Alta Gracia, a pleasant village in the hills, and where there is the best mountain hotel in the world. Alta Gracia is about an hour's run from Cordoba, and on Sundays there is a rush of holiday-makers, reminiscent of the Pullman express out of London down to Brighton on a Sunday morning. The "fixed charge" is popular. Everybody knows exactly how much the outing is going to cost. At ten o'clock a train thronged with holiday-makers sets out for Alta Gracia. By eleven o'clock the place is reached. At noon there is déjeuner. The afternoon can be spent lounging about, listening to the band, playing golf, playing tennis, gambling in the casino, taking walks in the wooded hills. At seven o'clock is dinner. The train returns at nine o'clock, and by ten Cordoba and home is reached.

One of the pleasantest week-ends in my life I spent at Alta Gracia. There is a little group of Englishmen, associated with the Central Argentine Railway, living at Cordoba, and, as officials have special cars, we had a couple of cars attached to the train on Saturday night. At Alta Gracia these were detached and side tracked. Then we "roughed it" for twenty-four hours. After the cocktails, and whilst dinner was being prepared, we sat out on the plain. On one side rose the village, revealed by points of light in the blackness, and on the summit of the hill was a glow of light just like a great and well-illumined liner appears as she ploughs the sea. That was the mountain hotel. On the other side was the prairie, just a streak of dark below the deep blue of the sky. The stars seemed bigger and nearer and more numerous than they do in northern climes. There was the usual searching for the Southern Cross, and when found we all agreed it was the most overrated constellation in the heavens. A caressing warmth was in the air. It was good to sit there, smoking our pipes and "listening to the silence."

THE NINTH GREEN AT ALTA GRACIA.

IN THE COURTYARD OF THE MONASTERY AT ALTA GRACIA.

Away on the plains of central South America—that sounds like "roughing it." But you have got to go much farther afield to rough it. The car which my friend and I had would have attracted much notice in England. There was a pleasant sitting-room, with big easy chairs and a real English open fireplace. There were three bedrooms, not the "cribb'd, cabin'd, confin'd" cabins we have in our "sleepers" at home, and there was the luxury of a bathroom. There was a kitchen, a chef, and a sprightly waiter. The whole car was lit by electricity. So we sat down to dinner—half a dozen courses as excellent as can be served at a London restaurant which looks after its reputation. We filled the coach with our tobacco smoke; we told our best stories; we exchanged yarns about things which had befallen us in distant parts of the world—in Siberia and Australia, Peru and Havana, the Soudan and California—for here the corners of the earth were met in a side-tracked private car in the lee of a pretty holiday village in the middle of Argentina. The Spaniards have done much to this land; but bands of young Englishmen have played and are playing their part.

In the delicious freshness of the dawn we sauntered about in our pyjamas, drank tea and smoked cigarettes. The day came with a rush of glory. It was Sunday morning, and the bell in the monastic church on the hill was clanging for the faithful to go and pray. The mystery which hung over Alta Gracia had gone, and in the truthful light of the morning it was just a straggling Spanish village, with many trees about, and the red hills in the distance making a jagged background. It was a torrid Sunday morning, and when we had had our tubs, and had shaven and put on our flannels, we set out to "make a day of it."