From Buenos Aires to Mendoza, almost at the foot of the Andes, some six hundred miles away, the scene hardly changes. Far to the south the pampa is poorer and more sparse, but still splendid pasture for certain sorts of cattle, whilst in Entre Rios, the great tract between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, the country is wilder and more broken, especially towards the north. Scattered amongst the vast flocks of sheep upon the open veldt are many ostriches, now a profitable investment, whilst great numbers of running partridges seek cover in the pampa grass from the dreaded hawks that hover above them. The native grass is flesh-forming but not fattening, and, to an English grazier, looks poor food enough for the millions of head of cattle that thrive upon it. It does not, as does the best English pasture, entirely cover the surface, but grows in distinct tufts. The native grass, however, is now rapidly being supplanted in the rich plains of Central Argentina by new forms of pasture, mostly English, infinitely richer, perennial in its luxuriance, and forming upon this favoured soil the best cattle-grazing in the world.
AN OSTRICH.
Of late years, as Mr. Hirst shows in his book, enormous tracts of land, especially to the south of Buenos Aires and high up the Paraná, are being broken up for wheat-growing, and Bahia Blanca, the ambitious port south of Buenos Aires, bids fair soon to become a great centre of grain export. Vast quantities of maize are also raised in the country on the banks of the Paraná, and are mainly exported from Rosario. Whichever way one turns fresh evidences of fertility are forced upon the attention. Cattle standing knee-deep in pasture, sheep growing fat at fifty to the acre, leagues of ripening corn, equal to any on earth, growing upon virgin soil; flowers to which we are accustomed in England as tender shrubs developing here into robust blossoming trees; and fruit orchards flourishing, solid miles of them, prolific beyond belief, within a short distance of Buenos Aires, where only a few years ago nothing but wild scrub and tangled forest existed.
The extension of railways in every direction has now to a great extent destroyed or modified the old free life upon the pampas of Argentina. The estancias, except in remote districts, are often large establishments where all the comforts and some of the luxuries of life are to be found, instead of the walled semi-fortresses of olden times. The white-domed well, with its shady ombú-tree, still stands near the principal entrance to the courtyard, and the high palenque, the hitching-post for horses, still flanks the gateway, but the picturesque gaucho who goes loping over the plain, his lasso at his saddle-bow, his naked feet thrust into his big leather horseskin brogues, and his poncho fluttering in the breeze, is no longer the monarch of the pampa as he once was, for civilisation has touched even him. The silver ornaments that once covered his accoutrements are less abundant than they used to be; he is fortunately less free with his knife, for he was never much of a hand with a gun, loving the bolas better; and the rural railway station in which he likes to dawdle about in the intervals of his life in the saddle is the symbol of his discipline and decline.
The great waterways that characterise Argentina, although they are now less used for passenger traffic into the hinterland than formerly, must still in the future be a great, if not the principal, highway for the produce of the distant interior. Rosario, some two hundred miles above Buenos Aires on the Paraná, is a progressive and improving port, serving the rich maize and grain-growing expanses of the province of Santa Fé; and far up the stream, almost to the Paraguayan border at Corrientes, river ports are rapidly growing into importance as centres of export as the surrounding country is developed.
But wonderful as is the apparently boundless promise of this country of favoured plains, Argentina is not only pampa. The Gran Chaco, a great country still for the most part a wilderness, is a region of dim tropical forest, where the parrots, birds of paradise, and brilliant butterflies vie with those of the Amazon; a hot, moist region, where the monkey and the land crab flourish exceedingly, and where savage Indians still hunt down with primitive weapons the jaguar and the puma. From this sultry country of forest and flood to the almost treeless, arid steppes of Patagonia is a change rather to another world than to another province of the same Republic, and hardly less difference exists between the rolling plains of the pampa country and the magnificent regions of towering peaks, stern uplands, and vast lakes that form the Andine portions of Argentina.
The change is noticed as the road approaches Mendoza, where the pampa gradually gives way to a country strongly resembling parts of Southern Spain; a land of poplars, willows, and acacias shading endless lines of irrigation channels; for rain falls but seldom on this eastern side of the Sierra, and on all hands, climbing the lower laps of the hills and lining the valleys, are miles of vineyards, which provide a stout red wine for the rest of the Republic. Further west still the land becomes more broken and barren as the hills rise higher and higher, until the ruddy sides, white glaciers, and snow-crested mountains of the Sierra appear, the giant Aconcagua monarch of them all. Further south than this the wonderful series of lakes that are almost inland seas high up in the Andes exist, as yet only partially explored to decide the frontier dispute between the Argentine and Chile, the remote valleys and austere uplands where the giant sloth is still believed by many to linger, a sole survival of the world before the great flood that destroyed life upon the nascent continent unrecorded ages ago.