Patiño Cué was a wonderful site for a house. It stood high up on rolling open ground, surrounded by intensely green wooded knolls. The virgin tropical forest extended almost up to the dilapidated building on one side, whilst in front of it the ground fell away to a great lake, three miles away. A long range of green hills rose the other side of the water, and everywhere clear little brooks gurgled down to the lake.
I liked the place, in spite of its intense heat, and stayed there over a fortnight, helping with the cattle, and making myself as useful as I could in repairing what the "wasters" had allowed to go to ruin. They reposed meanwhile in their hammocks.
It was very pretty country, and had the immense advantage of being free from mosquitoes. As there are disadvantages everywhere, to make up for this it crawled with snakes.
Jardine's culinary operations were simplicity itself. He had some immense earthen jars four feet high, own brothers to those seen on the stage in "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" at pantomime time. These must have been the identical jars in which the Forty Thieves concealed themselves, to be smothered with boiling oil by the crafty Morgiana. By the way, I never could understand until I had seen fields of growing sesame in India why Ali Baba's brother should have mistaken the talisman words "Open Sesame" for "Open Barley." The two grains are very similar in appearance whilst growing, which explains it.
Jardine placed a layer of beef at the bottom of his jar. On that he put a layer of mandioca (the root from which tapioca is prepared), another layer of his own bacon, and a stratum of green vegetables. Then more beef, and so on till the jar was half full. In went a handful of salt, two handfuls of red peppers, and two gallons of water, and then a wood fire was built round the pot, which simmered away day and night till all its contents were eaten. The old Indian woman baked delicious bread from the root of the mandioca mixed with milk and cheese, and that constituted our entire dietary. There were no fixed meals. Should you require food, you took a hunch of mandioca bread and a tin dipper, and went to the big earthen jar simmering amongst its embers in the yard. Should you wish for soup, you put the dipper in at the top; if you preferred stew, you pushed it to the bottom. Nothing could be simpler. As a rough and ready way of feeding a household it had its advantages, though there was unquestionably a certain element of monotony about it.
As a variation from the eternal beef and mandioca, Jardine begged Dick and myself to shoot him as many snipe as possible, in the swamps near the big lake. Those swamps were most attractive, and were simply alive with snipe and every sort of living creature. Dick was an excellent shot, and we got from five to fifteen couple of snipe daily. The tree-crowned hillocks in the swamp were the haunts of macaws, great gaudy, screaming, winged rainbows of green and scarlet, and orange and blue, like some of Dick's blazers endowed with feathers and motion. We had neither of us ever seen wild macaws before, and I am afraid that we shot a good many for the sheer pleasure of examining these garish parrots at close quarters, though they are quite uneatable. I shall carry all my life marks on my left hand where a macaw bit me to the bone. There were great brilliant-plumaged toucans too, droll freaks of nature, with huge horny bills nearly as large as their bodies, given them to crack the nuts on which they feed. They flashed swiftly pink through the air, but we never succeeded in getting one. Then there were coypus, the great web-footed South American water-rat, called "nutria" in Spanish, and much prized for his fur. That marsh was one of the most interesting places I have ever been in. The old Indian woman warned us that we should both infallibly die of fever were we to go into the swamps at nightfall, but though Dick and I were there every evening for a fortnight, up to our middles in water, we neither of us took the smallest harm, probably owing to the temporary absence of mosquitoes. The teeming hidden wild-life of the place appealed to us both irresistibly. The water-hog, or capincho, is a quaint beast, peculiar to South America. They are just like gigantic varnished glossy-black guinea pigs, with the most idiotically stupid expression on their faces. They are quite defenceless, and are the constant prey of alligators and jaguars. Consequently they are very timid. These creatures live in the water all day, but come out in the evenings to feed on the reeds and water-herbage. By concealing ourselves amongst the reeds, and keeping perfectly still, we were able to see these uncouth, shy things emerging from their day hiding-places and begin browsing on the marsh plants. To see a very wary animal at close quarters, knowing that he is unconscious of your presence, is perfectly fascinating. We never attempted to shoot or hurt these capinchos; the pleasure of seeing the clumsy gambols of one of the most timid animals living, in its fancied security, was quite enough. The capincho if caught very young makes a delightful pet, for he becomes quite tame, and, being an affectionate animal, trots everywhere after his master, with a sort of idiotic simper on his face.
One evening, on our return from the marsh, we were ill-advised enough to attempt a short cut home through the forest. The swift tropical night fell as we entered the forest, and in half an hour we were hopelessly lost, "fairly bushed," as Dick put it. There is a feeling of complete and utter helplessness in finding oneself on a pitch-dark night in a virgin tropical forest that is difficult to express in words. The impenetrable tangles of jungle; the great lianes hanging from the trees, which trip you up at every step; the masses of thorny and spiky things that hold you prisoner; and, as regards myself personally, the knowledge that the forest was full of snakes, all make one realise that electric-lighted Piccadilly has its distinct advantages. Dick had the true Australian's indifference to snakes. He never could understand my openly-avowed terror of these evil, death-dealing creatures, nor could he explain to himself the physical repugnance I have to these loathsome reptiles. This instinctive horror of snakes is, I think, born in some people. It can hardly be due to atavism, for the episode of the Garden of Eden is too remote to account of an inherited antipathy to these gliding, crawling abominations. We settled that we should have to sleep in the forest till daylight came, though, dripping wet as we both were from the swamp, it was a fairly direct invitation to malarial fever. The resourceful Dick got an inspiration, and dragging his interminable length (he was like Euclid's definition of a straight line) up a high tree, he took a good look at the familiar stars of his own Southern hemisphere. Getting his bearings from these, he also got our direction, and after a little more tree-climbing we reached our dilapidated temporary home in safety. I fear that I shall never really conquer my dislike to snakes, sharks, and earthquakes.
Jardine was a great and an omnivorous reader. Dick too was very fond of reading. Like the hero of "Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour" he carried his own library with him. As in Mr. Sponge's case, it consisted of one book only, but in the place of being "Mogg's Cab Fares," it was a guide to the Australian Turf, a sort of Southern Cross "Ruff's Guide," with a number of pedigrees of Australian horses thrown in. Dick's great intellectual amusement was learning these pedigrees by heart. I used to hear them for him, and, having a naturally retentive memory, could in the "'eighties" have passed a very creditable examination in the pedigrees of the luminaries of the Australian Turf.
Our evenings at Patiño Cué would have amused a spectator, had there been one. In the tumble-down, untidy apology for a room, Jardine, seated on a packing-case under the one wall light, was immersed in his favourite Herbert Spencer; looking, in his flowing ponchos, long grey beard, and bare legs, like a bespectacled apostle. He always seemed to me to require an eagle, or a lion or some other apostolic adjunct, in order to look complete. I, on another packing-case, was chuckling loudly over "Monsieur et Madame Cardinal," though Paris seemed remote from Paraguay. Dick, pulling at a green cigar, a far-off look in his young eyes, was improving his mind by learning some further pedigrees of Australian horses, at full length on the floor, where he found more room for his thin, endless legs; whilst the two "wasters" dozed placidly in their hammocks on the verandah. The "wasters," I should imagine, attended church but seldom. Otherwise they ought to have ejaculated "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done" with immense fervour, for they never did anything at all.
"Lotos-eaters" might be a more poetic name than "wasters," for if ever there was a land "in which it seemed always afternoon," that land is Paraguay. Could one conceive of the "wasters" displaying such unwonted energy, it is possible that—