CHAPTER XXIII.
HORSE AND MAN.
THERE is no mode of progression so delightful as riding on horseback. Walking, rowing, bicycling are pleasant exercises in their way, but the muscular exertion and constant exercise of judgment they call for occupy the mind partly to the exclusion of other things; so that a long walk may sometimes be only a long walk and nothing more. In riding we are not conscious of exertion, and as for that close observation and accurate discernment necessary in traversing the ground with speed and safety, it is left to the faithful servant that carries us. Pitfalls, hillocks, slippery places, the thousand little inequalities of the surface that have to be measured with infallible eye, these disturb us little. To fly or go slowly at will, to pass unshaken over rough and smooth alike, fording rivers without being wet, and mounting hills without climbing, this is indeed unmixed delight. It is the nearest approach to bird-life we seem capable of, since all the monster bubbles and flying fabrics that have been the sport of winds from the days of Montgolfier downwards have brought us no nearer to it. The aeronaut gasping for breath above the clouds offers only a sad spectacle of the imbecility of science and man's
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shattered hopes. To the free inhabitants of air we can only liken the mounted Arab, vanishing, hawklike, over the boundless desert.
In riding there is always exhilarating motion; yet, if the scenery encountered be charming, you are apparently sitting still, while, river-like, it flows toward and past you, ever giving place to fresh visions of beauty. Above all, the mind is free, as when one lies idly on the grass gazing up into the sky. And, speaking of myself, there is even more than this immunity from any tax on the understanding such as we require in walking; the rhythmic motion, the sensation as of night, acting on the brain like a stimulus. That anyone should be able to think better lying, sitting, or standing, than when speeding along on horseback, is to me incomprehensible. This is doubtless due to early training and long use; for on those great pampas where I first saw the light and was taught at a tender age to ride, we come to look on man as a parasitical creature, fitted by nature to occupy the back of a horse, in which position only he has full and free use of all his faculties. Possibly the gaucho--the horseman of the pampas--is born with this idea in his brain; if so, it would only be reasonable to suppose that its correlative exists in a modification of structure. Certain it is that an intoxicated gaucho lifted on to the back of his horse is perfectly safe in his seat. The horse may do his best to rid himself of his burden; the rider's legs--or posterior arms as they might appropriately be called--retain their iron grip, notwithstanding the fuddled brain.
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The Naturalist in La Plata.