The amphitheatre of wood enclosed a bay that ran so far into the land it seemed a lake. The Uruguay flowed past, but the bay was so land-locked and so well defended by an island lying at its mouth that the illusion was complete, and the bay appeared to be cut off from all the world.

Upon the river twice a day passed steamboats, which at night-time gave an air as of a section of a town that floated past the wilderness. Streams of electric light from every cabin lit up the yellow, turgid river, and the notes of a band occasionally floated across the water as the vessel passed. Sometimes a searchlight falling on a herd of cattle, standing as is their custom after nightfall upon a little hill, made them stampede into the darkness, dashing through brushwood or floundering through a marsh, till they had placed themselves in safety from this new terror of the night.

Above the bay the ruins of a great building stood. Built scarcely fifty years ago, and now deserted, the ruins had taken on an air as of a castle, and from the walls sprang plants, whilst in the deserted courtyard a tree had grown, amongst whose branches oven-birds had built their hanging nests of mud. Cypresses towered above the primeval hard-wood, which grew all gnarled and horny-looking, and nearly all had kept their Indian names, as Ñandubay, chaÑar, tala and sarandi, molle, and many another name as crabbed as the trunks which, twisted and distorted, looked like the limbs of giants growing from the ground.

Orange trees had run wild and shot up all unpruned, and apple trees had reverted back to crabs. The trunks of all the fruit-trees in the deserted garden round the ruined factory were rubbed shiny by the cattle, for all the fences had long been destroyed or fallen into decay.

A group of roofless workmen’s cottages gave an air of desolation to the valley in which the factory and its dependencies had stood. They too had been invaded by the powerful sub-tropical plant life, and creepers covered with bunches of bright flowers climbed up their walls. A sluggish stream ran through the valley and joined the Uruguay, making a little natural harbour. In it basked cat-fish, and now and then from off the banks a tortoise dropped into the water like a stone. Right in the middle of what once had been the square grew a ceiba tree, covered with lilac flowers, hanging in clusters like gigantic grapes. Here and there stood some old ombÚs, their dark metallic leaves affording an impenetrable shade. Their gnarled and twisted roots, left half-exposed by the fierce rains, gave an unearthly, prehistoric look to them that chimed in well with the deserted air of the whole place. It seemed that man for once had been subdued, and that victorious nature had resumed her sway over a region wherein he had endeavoured to intrude, and had been worsted in the fight.

Nature had so resumed her sway that buildings, planted trees, and paths long overgrown with grass, seemed to have been decayed for centuries, although scarce twenty years had passed since they had been deserted and had fallen into decay.

They seemed to show the power of the recuperative force of the primeval forest, and to call attention to the fact that man had suffered a defeat. Only the grass in the deserted square was still triumphant, and grew short and green, like an oasis in the rough natural grasses that flowed nearly up to it, in the clearings of the woods.

The triumph of the older forces of the world had been so final and complete that on the ruins there had grown no moss, but plants and bushes with great tufts of grass had sprung from them, leaving the stones still fresh as when the houses were first built. Nature in that part of the New World enters into no compact with mankind, as she does over here in Europe to touch his work kindly and almost with a reverent hand, and blend it into something half compounded of herself. There bread is bread and wine is wine, with no half-tints to make one body of the whole. The one remaining evidence of the aggression of mankind, which still refused to bow the knee to the overwhelming genius of the place, was a round bunch of eucalyptus trees that stood up stark and unblushing, the colour of the trunks and leaves so harshly different from all around them that they looked almost vulgar, if such an epithet can be properly applied to anything but man. Under their exiguous shade were spread saddles and bridles, and on the ground sat men smoking and talking, whilst their staked-out horses fed, fastened to picket-pins by raw-hide ropes. So far away from everything the place appeared that the group of men looked like a band of pioneers upon some frontier, to which the ruins only gave an air of melancholy, but did nothing to dispel the loneliness.

As they sat idly talking, trying to pass, or, as they would have said, trying to make time, suddenly in the distance the whistle of an approaching steamer brought the outside world into the little, lonely paradise. Oddly enough it sounded, in the hot, early morning air, already heavy with the scent of the mimosas in full bloom. Butterflies flitted to and fro or soared above the scrub, and now and then a wild mare whinnied from the thickets, breaking the silence of the lone valley through which the yellow, little stream ran to the Uruguay.

Catching their horses and rolling up the ropes, the men, who had been sitting underneath the trees, mounted, and following a little cattle trail, rode to a high bluff looking down the stream.

Panting and puffing, as she belched out a column of black smoke, some half a mile away, a tug towing two lighters strove with the yellow flood. The horsemen stood like statues with their horses’ heads stretched out above the water thirty feet below.

Although the feet of several of the horses were but an inch or two from the sheer limit, the men sat, some of them with one leg on their horses’ necks; others lit cigarettes, and one, with his horse sideways to the cliff, leaned sideways, so that one of his feet was in the air. He pointed to the advancing tug with a brown finger, and exclaimed, “These are the lighters with the horses that must have started yesterday from GualeguaychÚ, and ought to have been here last night.” We had indeed been waiting all the night for them, sleeping round a fire under the eucalyptus grove, and rising often in the night to smoke and talk, to see our horses did not get entangled in their stake ropes, and to listen for the whistle of the tug.

The tug came on but slowly, fighting her way against the rapid current, with the lighters towing behind her at some distance, looking like portions of a pier that had somehow or another got adrift.

From where we sat upon our horses we could see the surface of the Uruguay for miles, with its innumerable flat islands buried in vegetation, cutting the river into channels; for the islands, having been formed originally by masses of water-weeds and drift-wood, were but a foot or two above the water, and all were elongated, forming great ribbons in the stream.

Upon the right bank stretched the green prairies of the State of Entre-Rios, bounded on either side by the Uruguay and ParanÁ. Much flatter than the land upon the Uruguayan bank, it still was not a sea of level grass as is the State of Buenos Aires, but undulating, and dotted here and there with white estancia houses, all buried in great groves of peach trees and of figs. On the left bank on which we stood, and three leagues off, we could just see Fray Bentos, its houses dazzlingly white, buried in vegetation, and in the distance like a thousand little towns in Southern Italy and Spain, or even in Morocco, for the tower of the church might in the distance just as well have been a minaret.

The tug-boat slowed a little, and a canoe was slowly paddled out to pilot her into the little haven made by the brook that flowed down through the valley to the Uruguay.

Sticking out like a fishing-rod, over the stem of the canoe was a long cane, to sound with if it was required.

The group of horsemen on the bluff rode slowly down towards the river’s edge to watch the evolutions of the tug, and to hold back the horses when they should be disembarked. By this time she had got so near that we could see the horses’ heads looking out wildly from the sparred sides of the great decked lighters, and hear the thunderous noise their feet made tramping on the decks. Passing the bay, into which ran the stream, by about three hundred yards, the tug cast off one of the lighters she was towing, in a backwater. There it remained, the current slowly bearing it backwards, turning round upon itself. In the wild landscape, with ourselves upon our horses forming the only human element, the gigantic lighter with its freight of horses looked like the ark, as set forth in some old-fashioned book on Palestine. Slowly the tug crept in, the Indian-looking pilot squatted in his canoe sounding assiduously with his long cane. As the tug drew about six feet of water and the lighter not much more than three, the problem was to get the lighter near enough to the bank, so that when the hawser was cast off she would come in by her own way. Twice did the tug ground, and with furious shoutings and with all the crew staving on poles, was she got off again. At last the pilot found a little deeper channel, and coming to about some fifty feet away, lying a length or two above the spot where the stream entered the great river, she paid her hawser out, and as the lighter drifted shorewards, cast it off, and the great ark, with all its freight, grounded quite gently on the little sandy beach. The Italian captain of the tug, a Genoese, with his grey hair as curly as the wool on a sheep’s back, wearing a pale pink shirt, neatly set off with yellow horseshoes, and a blue gauze necktie tied in a flowing bow, pushed off his dirty little boat, rowed by a negro sailor and a Neapolitan, who dipped their oars into the water without regard to one another, either as to time or stroke.

The captain stepped ashore, mopping his face with a yellow pocket-handkerchief, and in the jargon between Spanish and Italian that men of his sort all affect out in the River Plate, saluted us, and cursed the river for its sandbanks and its turns, and then having left it as accursed as the Styx or Periphlegethon, he doubly cursed the Custom House, which, as he said, was all composed of thieves, the sons of thieves, who would be certainly begetters of the same. Then he calmed down a little, and drawing out a long Virginia cigar, took out the straw with seriousness and great dexterity, and then allowed about a quarter of an inch of it to smoulder in a match, lighted it, and sending out a cloud of smoke, sat down upon the grass, and fell a-cursing, with all the ingenuity of his profession and his race, the country, the hot weather, and the saints.

This done, and having seen the current was slowly bearing down the other lighter past the sandy beach, with a last hearty curse upon God’s mother and her Son, whose birth he hinted not obscurely was of the nature of a mystery, in which he placed no credence, got back into his boat, and went back to his tug, leaving us all amazed, both at his fluency and faith.

When he had gone and grappled with the other lighter which was slowly drifting down the stream, two or three men came forward in the lighter that was already in the little river’s mouth, about a yard or so distant from the edge, and calling to us to be ready, for the horses had not eaten for sixteen hours at least, slowly let down the wooden landing-flap. At first the horses craned their necks and looked out on the grass, but did not venture to go down the wooden landing-stage; then a big roan, stepping out gingerly and snorting as he went, adventured, and when he stood upon the grass, neighed shrilly and then rolled. In a long string the others followed, the clattering of their unshod feet upon the wood sounding like distant thunder.

Byrne, the PorteÑo, stout and high-coloured, dressed in great thigh boots and baggy breeches, a black silk handkerchief tied loosely round his neck, a black felt hat upon his head, and a great silver watch-chain, with a snaffle-bridle in the middle of it, contrasting oddly with his broad pistol belt, with its old silver dollars for a fastening, came ashore, carrying his saddle on his back. Then followed Doherty, whose name, quite unpronounceable to men of Latin race, was softened in their speech to Duarte, making a good Castilian patronymic of it. He too was a PorteÑo, [22] although of Irish stock. Tall, dark, and dressed in semi-native clothes, he yet, like Byrne, always spoke Spanish when no foreigners were present, and in his English that softening of the consonants and broadening of the vowels was discernible that makes the speech of men such as himself have in it something, as it were, caressing, strangely at variance with their character. Two or three peons of the usual Gaucho type came after them, all carrying saddles, and walking much as an alligator waddles on the sand, or as the Medes whom Xenophon describes, mincing upon their toes, in order not to blunt the rowels of their spurs.

Our men, Garcia the innkeeper of Fray Bentos, with Pablo Suarez, whose negro blood and crispy hair gave him a look as of a Roman emperor of the degenerate times, with Pancho Arrellano and Miguel Paralelo, the Gaucho dandy, swaying upon his horse with his toes just touching his heavy silver stirrups with a crown underneath them, Velez and El Pampita, an Indian who had been captured young on the south Pampa, were mounted ready to round the horses up.

They did not want much care, for they were eating ravenously, and all we had to do was to drive them a few hundred yards away to let the others land.

By this time the Italian captain in his tug had gently brought the other lighter to the beach, and from its side another string of horses came out on to the grass. They too all rolled, and, seeing the other band, by degrees mixed with it, so that four hundred horses soon were feeding ravenously on the sweet grass just at the little river’s mouth that lay between its banks and the thick belt of wood.

Though it was early, still the sun was hot, and for an hour we held the horses back, keeping them from the water till they had eaten well.

The Italian tugmaster, having produced a bottle of trade gin (the Anchor brand), and having drank our health, solemnly wiped the neck of the bottle with his grimy hand and passed it round to us. We also drank to his good health and voyage to the port, that he pronounced as if it were written “Bono Airi,” adding, as it was war-time, “Avanti Savoia” to the toast. He grinned, and with a gesture of his thick dirty hand, adorned with two or three coppery-looking rings, as it were, embedded in the flesh, pronounced an all-embracing curse on the Tedeschi, and went aboard the tug.

When he had made the lighters fast, he turned down stream, saluting us with three shrill blasts upon the whistle, and left us and our horses thousands of miles away from steam and smoke, blaspheming skippers, and the noise and push of modern life.

Humming-birds poised themselves before the purple bunches of the ceiba [25] flowers, their tongues thrust into the calyx and their iridescent wings whirring so rapidly, you could see the motion, but not mark the movement, and from the yellow balls of the mimosas came a scent, heady and comforting.

Flocks of green parroquets flew shrieking over the clearing in which the horses fed, to their great nests, in which ten or a dozen seemed to harbour, and hung suspended from them by their claws, or crawled into the holes. Now and then a few locusts, wafted by the breeze, passed by upon their way to spread destruction in the plantations of young poplars and of orange trees in the green islands in the stream.

An air of peace gave a strange interest to this little corner of a world plunged into strife and woe. The herders nodded on their horses, who for their part hung down their heads, and now and then shifted their quarters so as to bring their heads into the shade. The innkeeper, Garcia, in his town clothes, and perched upon a tall grey horse, to use his own words, “sweated blood and water like our Lord” in the fierce glare of the ascending sun. Suarez and Paralelo pushed the ends of the red silk handkerchiefs they wore tied loosely round their necks, with two points like the wings of a great butterfly hanging upon their shoulders, under their hats, and smoked innumerable cigarettes, the frontiersman’s specific against heat or cold. Of all the little company only the Pampa Indian showed no sign of being incommoded by the heat. When horses strayed he galloped up to turn them, now striking at the passing butterflies with his heavy-handled whip, or, letting himself fall down from the saddle almost to the ground, drew his brown finger on the dust for a few yards, and with a wriggle like a snake got back into his saddle with a yell.

The hours passed slowly, till at last the horses, having filled themselves with grass, stopped eating and looked towards the river, so we allowed them slowly to stream along towards a shallow inlet on the beach. There they stood drinking greedily, up to their knees, until at last three or four of the outermost began to swim.

Only their heads appeared above the water, and occasionally their backs emerging just as a porpoise comes to the surface in a tideway, gave them an amphibious air, that linked them somehow or another with the classics in that unclassic land.

Long did they swim and play, and then, coming out into the shallow water, drink again, stamping their feet and swishing their long tails, rise up and strike at one another with their feet.

As I sat on my horse upon a little knoll, coiling my lazo, which had got uncoiled by catching in a bush, I heard a voice in the soft, drawling accents of the inhabitants of Corrientes, say, “Pucha, Pingos.” [27]

Turning, I saw the speaker, a Gaucho of about thirty years of age, dressed all in black in the old style of thirty years ago. His silver knife, two feet or more in length, stuck in his sash, stuck out on both sides of his body like a lateen.

Where he had come from I had no idea, for he appeared to have risen from the scrub behind me. “Yes,” he said, “Puta, Pingos,” giving the phrase in the more classic, if more unregenerate style, “how well they look, just like the garden in the plaza at Fray Bentos in the sun.”

All shades were there, with every variegation and variety of colour, white, and fern noses, chestnuts with a stocking on one leg up to the stifle joint, horses with a ring of white right round their throats, or with a star as clear as if it had been painted on the hip, and “tuvianos,” that is, brown, black, and white, a colour justly prized in Uruguay.

Turning half round and offering me a cigarette, the Correntino spoke again. “It is a paradise for all those pingos here in this rincÓn: [28] grass, water, everything that they can want, shade, and shelter from the wind and sun.”

So it appeared to me—the swiftly flowing river with its green islands; the Pampas grass along the stream; the ruined buildings, half-buried in the orange trees run wild; grass, shade, and water: “Pucha, no . . . Puta, Pingos, where are they now?”