The pupils at Espartillar were exceedingly well treated. The house was most comfortably furnished, and contained a full-sized English billiard-table, two pianos, a plentiful supply of books, and a barrel- organ, for this was many years before the birth of the gramophone. It is the singular custom on most estancias to kill beef for six months of the year, and mutton for the remaining six, which entails a certain monotony of diet. We had fallen in for the beef-eating half-year, but the French wife of the English estancia-carpenter officiated as cook, and she had all the culinary genius of her countrywomen. Above all she avoided those twin abominations "Ajo" and "Aji," or garlic and green chilli, which Argentines cram into every dish, thus making them hideously unpalatable to Northern Europeans.
In an absolutely treeless land, without any coal measures, fuel is one of the greatest difficulties of camp life. In my time, in the city of Buenos Ayres, all the coal came from England, and cost, delivered, 5 pounds a ton. Its cost in the country, hauled for perhaps twenty miles over the roadless camp, would be prohibitive, and there was no wood to be had. For this reason, on every estancia there were some ten acres planted with peach trees. It seems horribly wasteful to cut down peach trees for fuel, but they grow very rapidly, burn admirably, and whilst they are standing the owner gets an unlimited supply of peaches for pickling and preserving. The soil of the Argentine suits peaches, and both sorts, the pink-fleshed European "free-stone" and the American yellow-fleshed "cling-stone," do splendidly. In Spanish, the former are called melocotones, the latter duraznos. At Espartillar there were quite twenty acres of peach trees, and when Lyon and I wished to be of use, the manager frequently asked us to hitch-up the wagon, and bring him in a few sackfuls of peaches for preserving.
Espartillar boasted a great neglected wilderness of a garden, as untidy and unkempt as a fashionable pianist's hair, but growing the most wonderful collection of fruit. Here pears, peaches, lemons, guavas, and strawberries flourished equally well in the accommodating Argentine climate, and the pears of South America, the famous peras de agua, must be tasted before their excellence can be imagined. The garden was traversed by an avenue of fine eucalyptus trees, amongst whose dusky foliage little screaming green parrakeets darted in and out all day long, like flashes of vivid emerald light. The garden was also, unfortunately, the favourite recreation-ground of a family of lively skunks, and the skunk is an animal whose terrific offensive powers necessitate extreme caution in approaching him. Should a young dog unwarily attempt to tackle a skunk, he had to be rigorously quarantined for a fortnight, for otherwise the inexpressibly sickening odour was unendurable.
Beyond the garden enclosure, the dun-coloured expanse of treeless featureless camp stretched its endless flat levels to the horizon, the wooden posts supporting the wire fences being the only sign that man had ever invaded these vast solitudes. Our minds are so constituted that we set bounds to everything, for everything to which we are accustomed has limits; one had a perpetual feeling that were one only to ride over the camp long enough, towns and human habitations must be reached somewhere. A glance at the map showed that this was not so. Due south one could have ridden hundreds of miles with no variations whatever to mark the distances achieved. This endless camp had apparently no beginning and no end; it was as though one had suddenly come face to face with Eternity.
All my experiences, however, are thirty years old. I believe that now, within a radius of fifty miles from Buenos Ayres, most of the camp has been broken up and ploughed. Growing wheat now covers the vast khaki-coloured plains I recollect dotted with roving herds of cattle. The picturesque and half-savage Gaucho, who lived entirely on meat, and would have scorned to have walked even a hundred yards on foot, has been replaced by the Italian agricultural labourer, who lives on polenta and macaroni, and will cheerfully trudge any distance to his work. The great solitudes have gone, for with tillage there must be roads now, and villages, and together with the solitudes the wonderful teeming bird-life must have vanished, too.
I prefer to recollect the Espartillar I knew, a place of unending spaces and glorious sunshine, with air almost as intoxicating as wine, where innumerable spurred plovers screamed raucously all day long, where the little ground-owls blinked unceasingly at the edge of their burrows; where bronze-green ibises flashed through the sunlight, and rose-coloured spoonbills trailed in pink streaks across the blue sky, as they flew in single file from one laguna to another. That marvellous bird-life was worth travelling seven thousand miles to see; wheatfields can be seen anywhere.
CHAPTER IX
Difficulties of an Argentine railway engineer—Why Argentina has the Irish gauge—A sudden contrast—A more violent contrast—Names and their obligations—Capetown—The thoroughness of the Dutch pioneers—A dry and thirsty land—The beautiful Dutch Colonial houses—The Huguenot refugees—The Rhodes Fruit Farms—Surf-riding—Groote Schuur—General Botha—The Rhodes Memorial—The episode of the Sick Boy—A visit from Father Neptune—What pluck will do.
A railway engineer in the Argentine Republic is confronted with peculiar difficulties. In the first place, in a treeless country there is obviously no wood for sleepers. A thousand miles up the giant Parana there are vast tracts of forest, but either the wood is unsuited for railway-sleepers, or the means of transport are lacking, so the engineer is forced to use iron pot-sleepers for supporting his rails. These again require abundant ballast, and there is no ballast in a country devoid of stone and with a soil innocent of the smallest pebble. The engineer can only use burnt clay to ballast his road, and as a result the dust on an Argentine railway defies description. In my time, when carriages of the English type were in use, the atmosphere after an hour's run was as thick as a dense London November fog, and after five or six hours' travelling the passengers alighted with faces as black as niggers'. Whilst waiting for a train, its approach would be announced by a vast pillar of dust appearing in the distance. This pillar of dust seemed almost to reach the sky, and any passengers of Hebraic origin must really have imagined themselves back in the Sinai peninsula, and must have wondered why the dusky pillar was approaching them instead of leading them on.
The difficulties connected with the working of railways did not end here. Most people know that a swarm of locusts can stop a train, for the bodies of these pests are full of grease, and after the engine-wheels have crushed countless thousands of locusts, the wheels become so coated with oil that they merely revolve, and refuse to grip the rails. Let the driver open his sand-box never so widely, the wheels cannot bite, and so the train comes to a standstill. Oddly enough, a bird, too, causes a great deal of trouble. The "oven-bird" makes a large domed nest of clay, the size of a cocoa-nut. In that treeless land the oven-birds look on telegraph-posts as specially provided by a benign Providence to afford them eligible nesting-sites, and from some perversity of instinct, or perhaps attracted by the gleam of the white earthenware, they invariably select one of the porcelain insulators as the site of their future home, and proceed to coat it laboriously with clay, thus effectually destroying the insulation. Now the working of a single-line is entirely dependent on the telegraph, and the oven-birds, with their misplaced zeal, were continually interrupting telegraphic communication, so on the Great Southern Railway of Buenos Ayres every single telegraph-post was surmounted with a wooden box, mutely proclaiming itself the most desirable building-site that heart of bird could wish for, and silently offering whatever equivalents to a gravel soil and a southern aspect could suggest themselves to the avian intelligence. In spite of this these misguided fowls retained their affection for the insulators, and the Great Southern had during the nesting season to employ a gang of men to tear the nests down.