Pasted
into an old scrap-book, chiefly filled with newspaper cuttings
from Texan and Mexican newspapers containing accounts of Indian
fights, the prowess of different horses (notably of a celebrated
“claybank,” which carried the mail-rider from El Paso
to Oakville, Arizona), and interspersed with advertisements of
strayed animals, pictures of Gauchos, Indians, Chilians,
Brazilians, and Gambusinos, is an old coffee-coloured business
card. On it is set forth, that Francisco Cardozo de
Carvallo is the possessor of a “Grande Armazem de Fazendas,
ferragems, drojas, chapeos, miudezas, e objectos de fantasia e de
modas.”
All the above, “Com grande reduccao nos
preços.” Then occurs the significant
advertença, “Mas A Dinheiro,” and the address
Rua do Commercio, No. 77.—Cruz
Alta.
Often on winter nights when all the
air is filled with whirling leaves dashing against the panes,
when through the house sweep gusts of wind making the passages
unbearable with cold, the rooms disconsolate, and the whole place
feel eerie and ghostlike as the trees creak, groan and labour,
like a ship at sea, I take the scrap-book down.
In it are many things more interesting by far to me at certain
times than books or papers, or than the conversation of my valued
friends; almost as great a consolation as is tobacco to a bruised
mind; and
then I turn the pages over with delight tinged with that
melancholy which is the best part of remembrance.
So amongst tags of poetry as Joaquim Miller’s lines
“For those who fail,” the advertisement for my
fox-terrier Jack, the “condemndest little buffler”
the Texans called him, couched in the choicest of Castilian, and
setting forth his attributes, colour and name, and offering five
dollars to any one who would apprehend and take him to the
Callejon del Espiritu Santo, Mexico, curious and striking
outsides of match-boxes, one entire series illustrating the
“Promessi Sposi”; of scraps, detailing news of Indian
caciques long since dead, a lottery-ticket of the State of
Louisiana, passes on “busted” railways, and the like,
is this same coffee-coloured card.
I cannot remember that I was a great dealer at the emporium,
the glories of which the card sets forth, except for cigarettes
and “Rapadura”; that is, raw sugar in a little cake
done up in maize-leaves, matches, and an occasional glass of
white Brazilian rum.
Still during two long months the place stood to me in lieu of
club, and in it I used to meet occasional German
“Fazenderos,” merchants from Surucaba, and officers
on the march from San Paulo to Rio Grande; and there I used to
lounge, waiting for customers to buy a “Caballada” of
some hundred horses, which a friend and I had brought with
infinite labour from the plains of Uruguay. Thinking upon
the strange and curious types I used to meet, clad for the most
part in loose black Turkish trousers, broad-brimmed felt hats
kept in their place by a tasselled string beneath the chin, in
real or sham vicuña ponchos, high patent-leather boots,
sewn in patterns with red thread; upon the horses with silver
saddles and reins, securely tied to posts outside the door, and
on the ceaseless rattle of spurs upon the bare brick floors which
made a sort of obligato accompaniment to the monotonous music of
the guitar, full twenty years fall back.
Yet still the flat-roofed town, capital of the district in Rio
Grande known as Encima de la Sierra, the stopping-place for the
great droves of mules which from the Banda Oriental and Entre
Rios are driven to the annual fair at Surucaba; the stodgy
Brazilian countrymen so different from the Gauchos of the River
Plate; the negroes at that time slaves; the curious vegetation,
and the feeling of being cut off from all the world, are fresh as
yesterday.
Had but the venture turned out well, no doubt I had forgotten
it, but to have worked for four long months driving the horses
all the day through country quite unknown to me, sitting the most
part of each night upon my horse on guard, or riding slowly round
and round the herd, eating jerked beef, and sleeping, often wet,
upon the ground, to lose my money, has fixed the whole adventure on my memory
for life.
Failure alone is interesting.
Successful generals with their hands scarce dry from the blood
of half-armed foes; financiers, politicians; those who rise,
authors whose works run to a dozen editions in a year: the men
who go to colonies with or without the indispensable half-crown
and come back rich, to these we give our greetings in the
market-place; we make them knights, marking their children with
the father’s bourgeois brand: we marvel at their fortune
for a brief space, and make them doctors of civil law, exposing
them during the process to be insulted by our undergraduates,
then they drop out of recollection and become uninteresting, as
nature formed their race.
But those who fail after a glorious fashion, Raleigh,
Cervantes, Chatterton, Camoens, Blake, Claverhouse, Lovelace,
Alcibiades, Parnell, and the last unknown deck-hand who, diving
overboard after a comrade, sinks without saving him: these
interest us, at least they interest those who, cursed with
imagination, are thereby doomed themselves to the same failure as
their heroes were. The world is to the unimaginative, for
them are honours, titles, rank and ample waistbands; foolish
phylacteries broad as trade union banners; their own esteem and
death to sound of Bible leaves fluttered by sorrowing friends,
with the sure hope of waking up immortal in a new world on the same
pattern as the world that they have left.
After a wretched passage down the coast, we touched at Rio,
and in the Rua Direita, no doubt now called Rio Primero de Mayo
or some other revolutionary date, we saw a Rio Grandense soldier
on a fine black horse. As we were going to the River Plate
to make our fortunes, my companion asked me what such a horse was
worth, and where the Brazilian Government got their
remounts. I knew no horses of the kind were bred nearer
than Rio Grande, or in Uruguay, and that a horse such as the
trooper rode, might in the latter country be worth an
ounce. We learned in Rio that his price was eighty dollars,
and immediately a golden future rose before our eyes. What
could be easier than in Uruguay, which I knew well and where I
had many friends (now almost to a man dead in the revolutions or
killed by rum), to buy the horses and drive them overland to the
Brazilian capital?
We were so confident of the soundness of our scheme that I
believe we counted every hour till the boat put to sea.
Not all the glories of the Tijuca with its view across the bay
straight into fairyland, the red-roofed town, the myriad islets,
the tall palm-tree avenue of Botafogo, the tropic trees and
butterflies, and the whole wondrous panorama spread at our feet,
contented us.
During the voyage to the River Plate we planned the thing well
out, and talked it over with our friends. They, being
mostly of our age, found it well reasoned, and envied us, they
being due at banks and counting-houses, and other places where no
chance like ours of making money, could be found. Arrived
in Buenos Ayres, a cursed chance called us to Bahia Blanca upon
business, but though we had a journey of about a thousand miles
to make through territory just wasted by the Indians and in which
at almost every house a man or two lay dead, we counted it as
nothing, for we well knew on our return our fortunes were
assured.
And so the autumn days upon the Arroyo de los Huesos seemed
more glorious than autumn days in general, even in that climate
perhaps the most exhilarating of the world. Horses went
better, “maté” was hotter in the mouth, the
pulperia caña seemed more tolerable, and the
“China” girls looked more desirable than usual, even
to philosophers who had their fortunes almost as good as
made.
Our business in the province of Buenos Ayres done, and by this
time I have forgotten what it was, we sold our horses, some of
the best I ever saw in South America, for whatever they would
fetch, and in a week found ourselves in Durazno, a little town in
Uruguay, where in the camps surrounding, horses and mules were
cheap.
About a league outside the town, and in a wooded elbow of the
river Yi, lived our friend Don Guillermo. I myself years
before had helped to build his house; and in and out of season,
no matter if I arrived upon a “pingo” shining with
silver gear, or on a “mancaron” with an old saddle
topped by a ragged sheepskin, I was a welcome guest.
Ah! Don Guillermo, you and your brother Don Tomas rise also
through the mist of twenty years.
Catholics, Scotchmen, and gentlemen, kindly and hospitable,
bold riders and yet so religious that, though it must have been a
purgatory to them as horsemen, they used to trudge on foot to
mass on Sunday, swimming the Yi when it was flooded, with their
clothes and missals on their heads, may God have pardoned
you.
Not that the sins of either of them could have been great, or
of the kind but that the briefest sojourn in purgatory should not
have wiped them out.
To those rare Catholic families in Scotland an old-world
flavour clings. When Knox and that “lewid
monk,” the Regent Murray, all agog for progress and
so-called purer worship, pestered and bothered Scotland into a
change of faith, those few who clung to Catholicism seemed to
become repositories of the traditions of an older world.
Heaven and hell, no resting-place for the weaker souls
between, have rendered Scotland a hard place for the ordinary man
who wants his purgatory, even if by another name. Surely
our Scottish theologians had done well, although they heated
up our hell like a glass furnace, to leave us purgatory; that is
if “Glesca” be not purgatory enough even for those
who, like North Britons, have no doubt on any subject either in
heaven above, or in the earth below. So to the house of Don
Guillermo—even the name has now escaped me, though I see
it, mud-built and thatched with “paja,” standing on a
little sandy hill, surrounded on two sides by wood, on the others
looking straight out upon the open “camp”—hot
foot we came. Riding upon two strayed horses known as
“ajenos,” bought for a dollar each in Durazno, we
arrived, carrying our scanty property in saddle-bags, rode to the
door, called out “Hail, Mary!” after the fashion of
the country and in deference to the religion of our hosts, which
was itself of so sincere a caste that every one attempted to
conform to it, as far as possible, whilst in their house;
received the answer “Without sin conceived”; got off,
and straightway launched into a discussion of our plan.
Assembled in the house were Wycherley, Harrington and
Trevelyan, and other commentators, whose names have slipped my
mind. Some were “estancieros,” that is cattle
or sheep farmers; others again were loafers, all mostly men of
education, with the exception of Newfoundland Jack, a sailor, who
had left the navy in a hurry, after some peccadillo, but who,
once in the camp, took a high place amongst men, by his knowledge
of splicing, making turks’ heads, and generally applying all
his acquired sea-lore to saddlery, and from a trick he had of
forcing home his arguments with a short knife, the handle fixed
on with a raw cow’s tail, and which in using he threw from
hand to hand, and generally succeeded in burying deeply in his
opponent’s chest. Our friends all liked the scheme,
pronounced it practical and businesslike, and, to show goodwill,
despatched a boy to town to bring a demijohn of caña back
at full speed, instructing him to put it down to our account, not
to delay upon the way, and to be careful no one stole it at the
crossing of the Yi.
Long we sat talking, waiting for the advent of the boy, till
at last, seeing he would not come that night, and a thick mist
rising up from the river having warned us that the night was
wearing on, we spread our saddles on the floor, and went to
sleep. At daybreak, cold and miserable, the boy appeared,
bringing the caña in a demijohn, and to our questions said
he had passed the river, hit the “rincon,” and heard
the dogs bark in the mist; but after trying for an hour could
never find the house. Then, thinking that his horse might
know the way, laid down the reins, and the horse took him
straight to the other horses, who, being startled at the sudden
apparition of their friend saddled and mounted in the dead of
night, vanished like spectres into the thickest of the fog.
Then tired of riding, after an hour or two, took off his saddle,
and had
passed the night, as it appeared at daybreak, not a quarter of a
mile away.
Between the town and Don Guillermo’s house there ran a
river called the Yi; just at the pass a “balsa”
plied, drawn over by stout ropes. On either side the
“pass” stood pulperias, that is camp-stores, where
gin and sardines, Vino Carlon, Yerba, and all the necessaries of
frontier life could be procured. Horses and cattle, mules
and troops of sheep passed all the day, and gamblers plied their
trade, whilst in some huts girls, known as “Chinas,”
watched the passers-by, loitering in deshabille before their
mare’s hide doors, singing “cielitos,” or the
“gato,” to the accompaniment of a guitar, or merely
shouting to the stranger, “Che, si quieres cosa buena vente
por acá.” A half-Arcadian, half-Corinthian
place the crossing was; fights there were frequent, and a
“Guapeton,” that is, a pretty handler of his knife,
once kept things lively for a month or two, challenging all the
passers-by to fight, till luckily a Brazilian, going to the town,
put things in order with an iron-handled whip.
The owner of the “balsa,” one Eduardo Peña,
cherished a half-romantic, half-antagonistic friendship for Don
Guillermo, speaking of him as “muy Catolico,”
admiring his fine seat upon a horse, and yet not understanding in
the least the qualities which made him a man of mark in all the
“pagos” from the Porongos to the Arazati.
“Catolico,” with Peña, was but a matter of
pure faith, and going to mass a work of supererogation; and
conduct such as the eschewal of the China ladies at the pass,
with abstinence from all excess in square-faced gin, dislike to
monté, even with “Sota en la puerta,” and the
adversary with all his money staked upon another card, seemed to
him bigotry; for bigotry is after all not so much mere excess of
faith or want of tolerance, but a neglect to fall into the vices
of our friends. So, mounted on our two
“agenos,” one a jibber, the other a kicker at the
stirrup, and extremely hard to mount, we scoured the land.
Gauchos, Brazilians, negroes, troperos, cattle-farmers, each man
in the whole “pago” had at least a horse to
sell. Singly, driven, led, pulled unwillingly along in
raw-hide ropes, and sitting back like lapdogs walking in the
park, the horses came. We bought them all after much
bargaining, and then began to hunt about at farms, estancias, and
potreros, and to inquire on every side where horses could be
got. All the “dead beats,”
“sancochos,” buck-jumpers, wall-eyed and
broken-backed, we passed in a review. An English sailor
rode up to the place, dressed as a Gaucho, speaking but little
English, with a west-country twang. He, too, had horses,
which we bought, and the deal over, launched into the story of
his life.
It seemed that he had left a man-of-war some fifteen years
ago, married a native girl and settled down, and for ten years
had never met an Englishman. In English, still a sailor, but in
Spanish, a gentleman, courteous and civil, and fit to take his
place with any one; full of fine compliments, and yet a
horse-coper; selling us three good horses, and one, that the
first time I mounted him kicked like a zebra, although our friend
had warranted him quite free from vice, well bitted, and the one
horse he had which he reserved in general for the saddle of his
wife.
In a few days we had collected sixty or seventy, and to make
all complete, a man arrived, saying that specially on our
account, thirteen wild horses, or horses that had run wild, had
been enclosed. He offered them on special terms, and we,
saddling at once, rode twelve or thirteen leagues to see them;
and after crossing a river, wading through a swamp, and winding
in and out through a thick wood for several miles, we reached his
house. There, in a strong corral, the horses were,
wild-eyed and furious, tails sweeping to the ground, manes to
their knees, sweating with fear, and trembling if any one came
near. One was a piebald dun, about eight years of age,
curly all over like a poodle; one Pampa, that is, black with a
head as if it had been painted white to the ears; behind them,
coal-black down to his feet, which, curiously enough, were all
four white. A third, Overo Azulejo, slate-coloured and
white; he was of special interest, for he had twisted in his mane
a large iron spur, and underneath a lump as large as an apple,
where the spur had bumped upon his neck for years during his gallop
through the woods and plains. Each horse had some
peculiarity, most had been tame at one time, and were therefore
more to be dreaded than if they had been never mounted in their
lives.
As it was late when we arrived we tied our horses up and found
a ball in progress at the house. Braulio Islas was the
owner’s name, a man of some position in the land, young and
unmarried, and having passed some years of his life in Monte
Video, where, as is usual, he had become a doctor either of law
or medicine; but the life had not allured him, and he had drifted
back to the country, where he lived, half as a Gaucho, half as a
“Dotorcito,” riding a wild horse as he were part of
him, and yet having a few old books, quoting dog Latin, and in
the interim studying international law, after the fashion of the
semi-educated in the River Plate. Fastening our horses to
long twisted green-hide ropes, we passed into the house.
“Carne con cuero” (meat cooked with the hide) was
roasting near the front-door on a great fire of bones.
Around it men sat drinking maté, smoking and talking,
whilst tame ostriches peered into the fire and snapped up
anything within their reach; dogs without hair, looking like
pigs, ran to and fro, horses were tied to every post, fire-flies
darted about the trees; and, above all, the notes, sung in a high
falsetto voice of a most lamentable Paraguayan
“triste,” quavered in the night air and set the dogs
a-barking, when all the company at stated intervals took up the refrain, and
chanted hoarsely or shrilly of the hardships passed by Lopez in
his great camp at Pirayú.
Under the straw-thatched sheds whole cows and sheep were hung
up; and every one, when he felt hungry, cut a collop off and
cooked it in the embers, for in those days meat had no price, and
if you came up hungry to a house a man would say: “There is
a lazo, and the cattle are feeding in a hollow half a league
away.”
A harp, two cracked guitars, the strings repaired with strips
of hide, and an accordion, comprised the band. The girls
sat in a row, upon rush-seated chairs, and on the walls were
ranged either great bowls of grease in which wicks floated, or
homemade candles fixed on to nails, which left them free to
gutter on the dancers’ heads. The men lounged at the
door, booted and spurred, and now and then one walked up to the
girls, selected one, and silently began to dance a Spanish valse,
slowly and scarcely moving from the place, the hands stretched
out in front, and the girl with her head upon his shoulder, eyes
fast closed and looking like a person in a trance. And as
they danced the musicians broke into a harsh, wild song, the
dancers’ spurs rattled and jingled on the floor, and
through the unglazed and open windows a shrill fierce neigh
floated into the room from the wild horses shut in the
corral. “Dulces,” that is, those sweetmeats
made from the yolk of eggs, from almonds, and from nuts, and
flavoured with cinnamon and caraways brought by the Moors to
Spain, and taken by the Spaniards to the Indies, with sticky
cakes, and vino seco circulated amongst the female guests.
The men drank gin, ate bread (a delicacy in the far-off
“camp”), or sipped their maté, which, in its
little gourds and silver tube, gave them the appearance of
smoking some strange kind of pipe.
“Que bailen los Ingleses,” and we had to acquit
ourselves as best we could, dancing a “pericon,” as
we imagined it, waving our handkerchiefs about to the delight of
all the lookers-on. Fashion decreed that, the dance over,
the “cavalier” presented his handkerchief to the girl
with whom he danced. I having a bad cold saw with regret my
new silk handkerchief pass to the hand of a mulatto girl, and
having asked her for her own as a remembrance of her beauty and
herself, received a home-made cotton cloth, stiff as a piece of
leather, and with meshes like a sack.
Leaving the dance, as Braulio Islas said, as more
“conformable” to Gauchos than to serious men we
started bargaining. After much talking we agreed to take
the horses for three dollars each, upon condition that in the
morning Islas and all his men should help us drive a league or
two upon the road. This settled, and the money duly paid,
we went to bed, that is, lay down upon our saddles under the
“galpon.” To early morning the guitars went on,
and rising just about day-break we found the revellers
saddling their horses to depart in peace. We learned with
pleasure there had been no fight, and then after a maté
walked down to the corral. Knowing it was impossible to
drive the horses singly, after much labour we coupled them in
twos. I mounted one of them, and to my surprise, he did not
buck, but after three or four plunges went quietly, and we let
the others out. The bars were scarcely down when they all
scattered, and made off into the woods. Luckily all the
drivers were at hand, and after three or four hours’ hard
galloping we got them back, all except one who never reappeared;
and late in the evening reached Don Guillermo’s house and
let our horses into a paddock fenced with strong posts of
ñandubay or Tala and bound together with pieces of raw
hide.
So for a week or two we passed our lives, collecting horses of
every shade and hue, wild, tame and bagualon, that is, neither
quite wild nor tame, and then, before starting, had to go to
“La Justicia” to get a passport with their attributes
and marks.
I found the Alcalde, one Quintin Perez, sitting at his door,
softening a piece of hide by beating on it with a heavy mallet of
ñandubay. He could not read, but was so far advanced
towards culture as to be able to sign his name and
rubricate. His rubric was most elaborate, and he informed
me that a signature was good, but that he thought a rubric more
authentic. Though he could not decipher the document
I brought for signature, he scrutinized the horses’ marks,
all neatly painted in the margin, discussed each one of them, and
found out instantly some were from distant “pagos,”
and on this account, before the signature or rubric was appended,
in addition to the usual fee, I was obliged to “speak a
little English to him,” which in the River Plate is used to
signify the taking and receiving of that conscience money which
causes the affairs of justice to move pleasantly for all
concerned. Meanwhile my partner had gone to town (Durazno)
to arrange about the revision of the passport with the chief
authorities. Nothing moved quickly at that time in Uruguay;
so after waiting one or two days in town, without a word, he
quietly let loose his horse in a by-street at night to save his
keep, and casting about where he should leave his saddle, thought
that the cloak-room of the railway-station might be safe, because
the station-master was an Englishman. The saddle, having
silver stirrups and good saddle-cloths and silver-mounted reins
and bit, was worth more than the horse, which, being a stray, he
had bought for a couple of dollars, and was not anxious to
retain.
After a day or two of talk, and “speaking
English,” he wanted his saddle, and going to the station
found it gone. Not being up at that time in the ways of the
Republic, he informed the police, waited a day, then two days,
and found nothing done. Luckily, just at that time, I came
to town and asked him if he had offered a reward. Hearing
he had not, we went down to see the Commissary of Police, and
found him sitting in his office training two cocks to
fight. A rustle and the slamming of a door just marked the
hurried exit of a lady, who must have been assisting at the
main. Compliments duly passed, cigarettes lighted and
maté circulating, “served” by a negro soldier
in a ragged uniform with iron spurs upon his naked feet who stood
attention every time he passed the gourd in which the maté
is contained to either of us, we plunged into our talk.
“Ten dollars, Comissario.”
“No, señor, fifteen, and a slight gratification
to the man who brings the saddle back.”
We settled at thirteen, and then the Commissary winked slowly,
and saying, “This is not Europe,” asked for a little
something for himself, received it, and calling to the negro,
said—
“Tio Gancho, get at once to horse, take with you one or
two men, and scour the ‘pago’ till you bring this
saddle back. See that you find it, or I will have your
thumbs both broken as your toes are, by San Edovige and by the
Mother of our Lord.”
A look at Tio Gancho showed both his big toes had been broken
when a slave in Brazil, either to stop him walking, or, as the
Commissary thought, to help him to catch the stirrup, for he was
a noted rider of a redomon. [20]
Duly
next day the saddle was brought (so said the Commissary) into the
light of justice, and it then appeared one of the silver stirrups
had been lost. The Commissary was much annoyed, reproached
his men, being, as he said he was: “Un hombre muy
honrado.” After thinking the case well out, he
returned me two and a half dollars out of the thirteen I had
agreed to pay. Honour no doubt was satisfied upon both
sides, and a new silver stirrup cost ten dollars at the least;
but as the saddle was well worth sixty, we parted friends.
That is, we should have parted so had not the “Hombre muy
honrado” had another card to play.
“How long do you want the thief detained?” he
asked. And we, thinking to be magnanimous and to impress
him with our liberal ideas, said loftily—
“A month will do.”
“All right,” he answered, “then I must
trouble you for thirty dollars more for the man’s
maintenance, and for the gaoler’s fee.” This
was a stopper over all, and I said instantly—
“Being ignorant of your laws, perhaps we have looked at
the man’s offence too hardly, a week will do.”
So after paying five dollars down, we invited the Commissary to
drink, and left him well knowing that we should not be out of
sight before the man would be released, and the five dollars be
applied strictly towards the up-keep of “justice” in
the Partido of the Yi. Months afterwards I heard the
culprit worked two days cutting down weeds with a machete in the
public square; then, tired of it, being “un hombre de
á caballo,” had volunteered to join the army, was
received into the ranks, and in a few weeks’ time rose to
be sergeant, for he could sign his name.
All being ready, and some men (one a young Frenchman born in
the place) being found with difficulty, the usual revolution
having drained off the able-bodied men, we made all ready for the
start. We bid good-bye to Don Guillermo, and to Don Tomas,
giving them as an addition to their library (which consisted of
some lives of saints and an odd volume of “el culto al
Falo,” which was in much request), our only book the
“Feathered Arrow,” either by Aimard or by Gerstaeker,
and mounting early in the morning after some trouble with the
wilder of our beasts, we took the road.
For the first few leagues Don Guillermo rode with us, and
then, after a smoke, bade us goodbye and rode away; his tall,
lithe figure dressed in loose black merino trousers tucked into
his boots, hat tied beneath his chin, and Pampa poncho, fading
out of sight, and by degrees the motion of his right arm touching
his horse up, Gaucho fashion, at every step, grew slower, then
stood still, and lastly vanished with the swaying figure of the
rider, out of sight. Upon what Pampa he now gallops is to
me unknown, or whether, where he is, horses accompany him; but I would
fain believe it, for a heaven on foot would not be heaven to him;
but I still see him as he disappeared that day swaying to every
motion of his horse as they had been one flesh.
“Adios, Don Guillermo,” or perhaps “hasta
luego,” you and your brother Don Tomas, your hospitable
shanty, and your three large cats, “Yanish” and
“Yanquetruz,” with one whose name I cannot now
recall, are with me often as I think on times gone by; and still
to-day (if it yet stands), upon the darkest night I could take
horse outside Durazno, cross the Yi, not by the
“balsa,” but at the ford below, and ride without a
word to any one straight to your house.
Days followed one another, and nights still caught us upon
horseback, driving or rounding up our horses, and nothing
interested us but that “el Pangare” was lame;
“el Gargantillo” looked a little thin, or that
“el Zaino de la hacinda” was missing in the morning
from the troop. Rivers we passed, the Paso de los Toros,
where the horses grouped together on a little beach of stones
refused to face the stream. Then sending out a yoke of oxen
to swim first, we pressed on them, and made them plunge, and kept
dead silence, whilst a naked man upon the other bank called to
them and whistled in a minor key; for horses swimming, so the
Gauchos say, see nothing, and head straight for a voice if it
calls soothingly. And whilst they swam, men in canoes lay
down the stream to stop them drifting, and others swimming by
their side splashed water in their faces if they tried to
turn. The sun beat on the waste calling out the scent of
flowers; kingfishers fluttered on the water’s edge, herons
stood motionless, great vultures circled overhead, and all went
well till, at the middle of the stream, a favourite grey roan
mare put up her head and snorted, beat the water with her feet,
and then sank slowly, standing quite upright as she
disappeared.
Mountains and plains we passed, and rivers fringed with thick,
hard thorny woods; we sweltered in the sun, sat shivering on our
horses during the watches of the night, slept fitfully by turns
at the camp fire, ate “charqui” and drank
maté, and by degrees passing the Paso de los Novillos, San
Fructuoso, and the foot-hills of Haedo and the Cuchilla de
Peralta with its twin pulperias, we emerged on to the plain,
which, broken here and there by rivers, slopes toward the
southern frontier of Brazil. But as we had been
short-handed from the first, our “caballada” had got
into bad ways. A nothing startled them, and the malign
example of the group of wildlings brought from Braulio Islas, led
them astray, and once or twice they separated and gave us hours
of work to bring them back. Now as a
“caballada” which has once bolted is in the future
easily disposed to run, we gave strict orders no one was to get
off, though for a moment, without hobbling his horse.
Camped
one cold morning on a river, not far from Brazil, and huddled
round a fire, cooking some sausages, flavoured with Chile pepper,
over a fire of leaves, one of our men who had been on horseback
watching all the night, drew near the fire, and getting off,
fastened his reins to a heavy-handled whip, and squatted on them,
as he tried to warm his hands. My horse, unsaddled, was
fastened by a lasso to a heavy stone, and luckily my partner and
the rest all had their horses well secured, for a
“coati” dived with a splash after a fish into the
river. In a moment the horses all took fright, and
separating, dashed to the open country with heads and tails
erect, snorting and kicking, and left us looking in despair,
whilst the horse with the whip fastened to the reins joined them,
and mine, tied to the stone, plunged furiously, but gave me time
to catch him, and mounting barebacked, for full five hours we
rode, and about nightfall brought the “caballada”
back to the camp, and driving them into an elbow of the river,
lighted great fires across the mouth of it, and went to sleep,
taking it conscientiously in turns to curse the man who let his
horse escape.
Five leagues or so upon the road the frontier lay, and here
the Brazilian Government had guards, but we being business men
smuggled our horses over in the night, led by a noted smuggler,
who took us by devious paths, through a thick wood, to a ford
known to him, only just practicable, and this we passed
swimming and wading, and struggling through the mud. The
river wound about through beds of reeds, trees known as
“sarandis” grew thickly on the banks, and as we
passed “carpinchos” [26] snorted; great fish
leaped into the air and fell with a resounding crash into the
stream, and in the trees was heard the scream of vultures, as
frightened by our passage they rose and weltered heavily through
the thick wood. By morning we were safe into Brazil,
passing a league or more through a thick cane-brake, where we
left several of our best horses, as to pursue them when they
straggled was impossible without running the risk of losing all
the rest. The crossing of the river had brought us to
another world. As at Carlisle and Gretna in the old days,
or as at Tuy and Valenza even to-day, the river had set a barrier
between the peoples as it had been ten miles instead of a few
hundred yards in width. Certainly, on the Banda Oriental,
especially in the department of Tacuarembò, many
Brazilians had emigrated and settled there, but living amongst
the Gaucho population, in a measure they had been forced to
conform to the customs of the land. That is, they practised
hospitality after the Gaucho fashion, taking no money from the
wayfaring man for a piece of beef; they lent a horse, usually the
worst they had, if one came to their house with one’s horse
tired; their women showed themselves
occasionally; and not being able to hold slaves, they
were obliged to adopt a different tone to men in general than
that they practised in the Empire of Brazil. But in the
time of which I write, in their own country they still carried
swords, slaves trotted after the rich
“fazendero’s” horse, the women of the family
never sat down to table with the men, and if a stranger chanced
to call on business at their house, they were as jealously kept
from his eyes as they had all been Turks.
The “Fazenda” houses had great iron-studded doors,
often a moat, and not infrequently a rusty cannon, though
generally dismounted, and a relic of bygone time. The
traveller fared, as a general rule, much worse than in the Banda
Oriental, for save at the large cattle-farms it was impossible to
buy a piece of meat. Admitted to the house, one rarely
passed beyond the guest-chamber, a room with four bare
white-washed walls; having for furniture a narrow hard-wood table
with wrought-iron supports between its legs; chairs cut
apparently out of the solid block, and a tin bucket or a large
gourd in the corner, with drinking-water; so that one’s
sojourn at the place was generally brief, and one’s
departure a relief to all concerned. Still on the frontier
the Gaucho influence made itself a little felt, and people were
not so inhospitable as they were further in the interior of the
land. Two or three leagues beyond the pass there was a
little town called “Don Pedrito,” towards which we
made; but
a “Pampero,” whistling from the south, forced us to
camp upon a stream known as the “Poncho Verde,”
where, in the forties, Garibaldi was reported to have fought.
Wet to the skin and without food, we saw a fazenda not a mile
away, rode up to it, and for a wonder were asked inside, had
dinner in the guest-chamber, the owner sitting but not eating
with us; the black Brazilian beans and bacon carried in pompously
by three or four stalwart slaves, who puffed and sweated, trod on
each other’s naked toes, and generally behaved as they had
been carrying sacks of corn aboard a ship, only that in this
instance no one stood in the gangway with a whip. Much did
the conversation run on politics; upon “A Guerra dos
Farapos,” which it appeared had riven the country in twain
what time our host was young. Farapo means a rag, and the
Republicans of fifty years ago in Rio Grande had adopted the
device after the fashion of “Les gueux.” Long
did they fight, and our host said: “Praise to God,
infructuously,” for how could men who wore moustaches and
full beards be compared to those who, like our host himself, wore
whiskers carefully trimmed in the style of those which at the
same epoch in our country were the trade-mark of the Iron
Duke? Elective kings, for so the old
“conservador” termed presidents, did not find favour
in his eyes; and in religion too the “farapos” were
seriously astray. They held the doctrine that all creeds should
be allowed; which I once held myself, but now incline to the
belief that a religion and a name should be bestowed at baptism,
and that it should be constituted heresy of the worst kind, and
punishable by a fine, to change or palter with either the name or
the religion which our fathers have bestowed.
Politics over, we fell a-talking upon other lands; on Europe
and England, Portugal, and as to whether “Rondon” was
larger than Pelotas, or matters of that sort. Then our host
inquired if in “Rondon” we did not use “la
bosa,” and I not taking the thing up, he rose and
stretching out his hands, set them revolving like a saw, and I
then saw our supposed national pastime was what he meant; and
told him that it was practised, held in repute, and marked us out
as a people set apart; and that our greatness was largely founded
on the exercise he had endeavoured to depict. We bade
farewell, not having seen a woman, even a negress, about the
place; but as we left, a rustling at the door showed that the
snuff-and-butter-coloured sex had been observing us after the
fashion practised in Morocco and in houses in the East. The
hospitable “conservador” sent down a slave with a
great basket full of oranges; and seated at the camp we ate at
least three dozen, whilst the man waited patiently to take the
basket back.
Night caught us in the open “camp,” a south wind
blowing, and the drops congealing as they fell.
Three of us muffled in ponchos rode round the horses, whilst the
others crouched at the fire, and midnight come, the riders rode
to the fire, and stretched on the wet mud slept fitfully, whilst
the others took their place. Day came at last; and
miserable we looked, wet, cold, and hungry, the fire black out,
matches all damp, and nothing else to do but march till the sun
rose and made life tolerable. Arrived at a small rancho we
got off, and found the owner was a Spaniard from Navarre, married
to a Brazilian woman. In mongrel Portuguese he bade us
welcome; said he was no Brazilian, and that his house was ours,
and hearing Spanish brightened up, and said in broken Spanish,
mixed with Portuguese, that he could never learn that language,
though he had passed a lifetime in the place. The country
pleased him, and though he had an orange garden of some three
acres in extent, though palms, mameyes and bananas grew around
his door, he mourned for chestnuts, which he remembered in his
youth, and said he recollected eating them whilst in Navarre, and
that they were better than all the fruit of all Brazil; thinking,
like Naaman, that Abana and Pharpar were better than all the
waters of Israel, or rivers of Damascus; or perhaps moved in some
mysterious way by the remembrance of the chestnut forests, the
old grey stone-roofed houses, and the wind whistling through the
pine woods of some wild valley of Navarre. At the old
Spaniard’s house a difficulty cropped up with our men. I
having told a man to catch a horse which looked a little wild, he
answered he was not a horse-breaker, and I might ride the beast
myself. I promptly did so, and asked him if he knew what a
wild horse was, and if it was not true that horses which could be
saddled without tying their hind legs were tame, and the rest
laughing at him, he drew his knife, and running at me, found
himself looking down the barrel of a pistol which my partner with
some forethought had produced. This brought things to a
crisis, and they all left us, with a hundred horses on our
hands. Several Brazilians having volunteered, we took them,
bought a tame horse accustomed to carry packs, procured a
bullock, had it killed, and the meat “jerked”; and
making bags out of the hide, filled them with food, for, as the
Spaniard said, “in the country you intend to cross you
might as well be amongst Moors, for even money will not serve to
get a piece of beef.” A kindly soul the Spaniard, his
name has long escaped me, still he was interesting as but the
truly ignorant can ever be. The world to him was a great
mystery, as it is even to those who know much more than he; but
all the little landmarks of the narrow boundaries of his life he
had by heart; and they sufficed him, as the great world itself
cannot suffice those who, by living in its current, see its
muddiness.
So one day told another, and each night found us on horseback
riding round the drove. Through forest, over baking plain, up
mountain paths, through marshes, splashing to the saddle-flaps,
by lone “fazendas,” and again through herds of cattle
dotting the plain for miles, we took our way. Little straw
huts, each with a horse tied day and night before them, were our
fairway marks. Day followed night without adventure but
when a horse suddenly threw its rider and a Brazilian peon
uncoiled his lasso, and with a jangling of spurs against the
stirrups, sprang into life, and in a moment the long snaky rope
flew through the air and settled round the runaway just
underneath his ears. Once in a clearing, as we plodded on,
climbing the last barrier of the mountain range, to emerge upon
the district called “Encima de la Sierra,” a deer
appeared jumping into the air, and coming down again on the same
spot repeatedly, the Brazilians said that it was fighting with a
snake, for “God has given such instinct to those beasts
that they attack and kill all snakes, knowing that they are
enemies of man.” [32] A scheme of
the creation which, if held in its entirety, shows curious
lacunæ in the Creator’s mind, only to be bridged over
by that faith which in itself makes all men equal, that is, of
course, when they experience it and recognize its charm. So
on a day we crossed the hills, rode through a wood, and came out
on a plain at the far end of which a little town appeared.
For
about ten leagues in circumference the plain stretched out,
walled in with woods, which here and there jutted out into it,
forming islands and peninsulas. The flat-roofed town
straggled along three flat and sandy streets; the little plaza,
planted with mameyes and paraiso trees, served as a
lounging-place by day, by night a caravanserai for negroes; in
time of rain the streets were turned to streams, and poured their
water into the plaza, which became a lake. At the west
corner of the square was situated Cardozo’s store, the
chief emporium, mart, and meeting-place (after the barber’s
and the chemist’s) of the whole town. Two languid and
yellow, hermaphroditic young Brazilians dressed in alpaca coats,
white trousers, and patent leather boots dispensed the wares,
whilst negroes ran about rolling in casks of flour, hogsheads of
sugar, and bales of black tobacco from Bahia, or from
Maranhão. Such exterior graces did the little town
of the High Cross exhibit to us, wearied with the baking days and
freezing nights of the last month’s campaign. Whether
some Jesuit in the days gone by, when missionaries stood up
before their catechumens unsustained by Gatling guns, sheltered
but by a rude cross in their hands and their meek lives, had
named the place, in commemoration of some saving act of grace
done by Jehovah in the conversion of the heathen, none can
tell. It may be that the Rood set up on high was but a
landmark, or again to mark a frontier line against the heathen to
the north, or yet it may have been the grave of some Paulista,
who in his foray against the Jesuits in Paraguay died here on his
return, whilst driving on before him a herd of converts to become
slaves in far San Paulo, to the greater glory of the Lord.
All these things may have been, or none of them; but the quiet
sleepy place, the forests with their parrots and macaws, their
herds of peccaries, their bands of screaming monkeys, the
bright-striped tiger-cats, the armadillos, coatis,
capibarás, and gorgeous flaming “seibos,” all
intertwined by ropes of living cordage of lianas, and the supreme
content of all the dwellers in the district, with God,
themselves, their country, and their lives, still after twenty
years is fresh, and stirs me, as the memory of the Pacific stirs
a reclaimed “beach-comber” over his grog, and makes
him say, “I never should have left them islands, for a man
was happy in ’em, living on the beach.”
To this commercial centre (centro do commercio) we were
advised to go, and there I rode, leaving my partner with the
peons riding round the caballada upon the plains. Dressed
as I was in the clothes worn by the Gauchos of the Banda
Oriental, a hat tied underneath the chin with a black cord, a
vicuña poncho, and armed with large resounding silver
spurs, I made a blot of colour in Cardozo’s shop amongst
the quietly dressed Brazilians, who, though they were some of the
smartest
men in South America upon a horse, were always clad in
sober-coloured raiment, wore ordinary store-cut trousers, and had
their feet endued with all the graces of a five-dollar
elastic-sided boot.
Half-an-hour’s talk with the chief partner shattered all
our plans. It then appeared that to take horses on to Rio
was impossible, the country, after San Paulo, being one dense
forest, and even if the horses stood the change of climate, the
trip would take a year, thus running off with any profit which we
might expect. Moreover, it appeared that mules were in
demand throughout Brazil, but horses, till past San Paulo, five
hundred miles ahead, but little valued, and almost as cheap,
though much inferior in breed to those bred on the plains of
Uruguay. He further told us to lose not a day in teaching
all the horses to eat salt, for without that they would not live
a month, as once the range of mountains passed between Cruz Alta
and the plains, no horse or mule could live without its three
months’ ration of rock-salt; there being in the pasture
some malign quality which salt alone could cure. Naturally
he had the cheapest salt in the whole town, and as our horses
were by this time so thin that it was quite impossible to take
them further without rest, they having been a month upon the
road, we set about to find an enclosed pasture where we could let
them feed.
Xavier
Fernandez, a retired slave- and mule-dealer, was the man on whom
by accident we fell. Riding about the plain disconsolately,
like Arabs changing their pastures, and with our horses feeding
near a little pond, we met him. An old straw hat,
bed-ticking trousers, and with his naked feet shoved into
slippers of carpindo leather, and an iron spur attached to one of
them and hanging down at least an inch below his heel, mounted
upon a mule saddled with the iron-framed Brazilian saddle, with
the addition of a crupper, a thing strange to our eyes,
accustomed to the wild horses of the plains, he did not look the
type of “landed gentleman,” but such he was, owner of
flocks and herds, and, in particular, of a well-fenced pasture,
enclosing about two leagues of land.
After much talk of things in general, of politics, and of the
revolution in progress in the republic we had left, upon our
folly in bringing horses, which could go no further into the
interior, and of the money we should have made had we brought
“bestas,” that is, mules, we agreed to pay him so
much a month for the use of his fenced pasture, and for our
maintenance during the time we stayed. Leaving the horses
feeding, watched by the men, we rode to see the place. Upon
the way Xavier imparted much of history, a good deal of his lore,
and curious local information about Cruz Alta, duly distorted, as
befits a reputable man, through the perspective of his predilections,
politics, faith, opinions, and general view of life.
We learned that once Cruz Alta was a most important place,
that six-and-thirty thousand mules used to be wintered there, and
then in spring moved on to the great fair at Surucuba in the
Sertão, that is the forest district of San Paulo, and then
sold to the merchants from the upper districts of Brazil.
But of late years the number had been much reduced, and then
stood at about twelve thousand. This he set down to the
accursed steamboats which took them up the coast, to the
continual fighting in the state of Uruguay, and generally to the
degeneration which he thought he saw in man. In the heyday
of the prosperity of the place “gold flowed from every
hand,” so much so, that even “as mulheres da
vida” kept their accounts in ounces; but now money was
scarce, and business done in general by barter, coin being hardly
even seen except for mules, for which it was imperative, as no
one parted with “bestas” except for money down.
Passing a little wood we saw a row of stakes driven into the
ground, and he informed us that they were evidently left by some
Birivas, that is people from San Paulo, after having used them to
secure their mules whilst saddling. The Paulistas, we then
learned, used the “sirigote,” that is, the
old-fashioned high-peaked saddle brought from Portugal in times
gone by, and not the “recado,” the saddle of the
Gauchos, which is flat, and suited better for galloping upon a plain
than for long marches over mountain passes and through
woods. All the points, qualities, with the shortcomings and
the failings of a mule, he did rehearse. It then appeared a
mule should be mouse-coloured, for the red-coloured mule is of no
use, the grey soft-footed, and the black bad-tempered, the
piebald fit “for a German,” which kind of folk he
held in abhorrence mixed with contempt, saying they whined in
speaking as it had been the whining of an armadillo or a
sloth. The perfect mule should be large-headed, not with a
little-hammer head like to a horse, but long and thin, with ears
erect, round feet, and upon no account when spurred ought it to
whisk its tail, for that was most unseemly, fit but for Germans,
Negroes, Indians, and generally for all those he counted
senseless people—“gente sem razão”;
saying “of course all men are of one flesh, but some are
dog’s flesh, and let them ride mules who whisk about their
tails like cattle in a marsh.” Beguiled by these, and
other stories, we soon reached the gate of the enclosure, and he,
dismounting, drew a key from one of the pockets of his belt and
let us in. A short half-hour brought us up to his house,
passing through ground all overgrown with miamia and other shrubs
which did not promise to afford much pasturage; but he informed
us that we must not expect the grasses of the plains up at Cruz
Alta, and thus conversing we arrived before his house.
Surrounded by a fence enclosing about an acre, the house
stood just on the edge of a thick wood. On one side were
the corrals for horses and for cattle, and on the other the
quarters of the slaves. In shape the houses resembled a
flattish haystack thatched with reeds, and with a verandah rising
round it, supported on strong posts. At either end a kind
of baldachino, one used as a stable and the other as a kitchen,
and in the latter a fire continually alight, and squatted by it
night and day a negress, either baking flat, thin girdle-cakes
made of maize, shaking the flour out of her hand upon an iron
plate, or else filling a gourd of maté with hot water, and
running to and fro into the house to give it to her mistress,
never apparently thinking it worth while to take the kettle with
her into the house.
The family, not quite so white as Xavier himself, consisted of
a mother always in slippers, dressed in a skirt and shift, which
latter garment always seemed about to fall down to her waist, and
two thin, large-eyed, yellowish girls arrayed in vestments like a
pillow-case, with a string fastening them at the narrowest
place. Slave girls of several hues did nothing and
chattered volubly, and their mistress had to stand over them, a
slipper in her hand, when maize was pounded in a rough mortar
hewn from a solid log, in which the slaves hammered with pestles,
one down, the other up, after the fashion of blacksmiths making a
horsehoe, but with groans, and making believe to be extenuated after three
minutes’ work, and stopping instantly the moment that their
mistress went into the house to light her cigarette.
An official in Cruz Alta, known as the Capitão do
Matto, holding a status between a gamekeeper and a parish clerk,
kept by the virtue of his office a whipping-house, to which
recalcitrant or idle slaves were theoretically sent; but in the
house of Xavier at least no one took interest enough in anything,
except Xavier himself, to take the trouble; and the slaves ruled
the female part of the establishment, if not exactly with a rod
of iron, still to their perfect satisfaction, cooking and sewing
now and then; sweeping, but fitfully; and washing when they
wanted to look smart and figure at a dance. The
Capitão do Matto was supposed to bring back runaways and
keep a leash of bloodhounds, but in the memory of man no one had
seen him sally forth, and for the blood-hounds, they were long
dead, although he drew regular rations for their
maintenance. In the interior of Brazil his office was no
sinecure, but in Cruz Alta horses were plentiful, the country
relatively easy, and slaves who ran away, which happened seldom,
timed their escape so as to put a good day’s journey
between them and any possible pursuit, and on the evening of the
fifth day, if all went well, they got across the frontier into
Uruguay.
Terms once arranged, we let our horses loose, laid out
rock-salt in lumps, first catching several of the tamest horses,
and forcing pieces into their mouths; they taught the others, and
we had nothing more to do. We paid our peons off, got our
clothes washed, rested, and then found time at first hang heavy
on our hands. Hearing an Englishman lived about ten leagues
off, we saddled up and rode to visit him. After losing
ourselves in a thick forest of some kind of pine, we reached his
house, but the soi-disant Briton was from Amsterdam, could
speak no English, was a little drunk, but asked us to get off and
dine with him. During the dinner, which we had all alone,
his wife and daughter standing looking at us (he too drunk to
eat), pigs ran into the room, a half-grown tapir lay in a corner,
and two new-caught macaws screamed horribly, so that, the banquet
over, we did not stay, but thanked him in Portuguese, which he
spoke badly, and rode off home, determining to sleep at the first
wood, rather than face a night in such a place.
The evening caught us near to a forest, the trail, sandy and
white, running close to a sort of cove formed in the trees, and
here we camped, taking our saddles off, lighting a fire, and
lying down to sleep just in the opening of the cove, our horses
tied inside. All through the night people appeared to pass
along the road. I lay awake half-dozing now and then, and
watched the bats, looked at the fire-flies flitting about the
trees, heard the harsh howling of the monkeys, the tapirs stamp, the
splash made by the lobos and carpinchos as they dashed into the
stream, and then slept soundly, and awoke to find one of the
horses gone. The moon shone brightly, and, waking up my
friend, I told him of our loss. We knew the horse must have
a rope attached to him, and that he probably would try to get
back to Cruz Alta, along the road we came. My horse was
difficult to bit, but by the aid of tying up one foot, and
covering his eyes up with a handkerchief, we bitted him, then
mounted both of us upon his back, hiding the other saddle behind
some grass, and started on the road. The sandy trail was
full of horses’ tracks, so that we could do nothing but
ride on, hoping to catch him feeding by the way. About a
league we rode, and then, not seeing him, turned slowly back to
get the other saddle, make some coffee, and start home when it
was light. To our astonishment, upon arriving at the cove,
the other horse was there, and neighing wildly, straining on his
rope, and it appeared that he had never gone, but being tied
close to the wood had wandered in, and we, thinking he must have
gone, being half-dazed with sleep, had never thought of looking
at his rope.
Defrauded, so to speak, out of our Englishman, and finding
that the horses, after the long journey and the change of water
and of grass, daily grew thinner, making it quite impossible to
move them, forwards or back, and after having vainly tried to sell them,
change them for mules, or sugar, quite without success, no one
except some “fazendero” here and there caring for
horses in a land where every one rode mules, we settled down to
loaf. Once certain we had lost our money and our pains,
nothing remained but to wait patiently until the horses got into
sufficient state to sell, for all assured us that every day we
went further into the interior, they would lose flesh, that we
should have them bitten by snakes in the forests, and arrive at
Rio, if we ever got there, either on foot, or with but the horses
which we rode.
For a short time we had almost determined to push on, even if
we arrived at Rio with but a horse apiece. Then came
reflection, that reflection which has dressed the world in drab,
made cowards of so many heroes, lost so many generous impulses,
spoiled so many poems, and which mankind has therefore made a god
of, and we decided to remain. Then did Cruz Alta put on a
new look. We saw the wondrous vegetation of the woods, felt
the full charm of the old-world quiet life, watched the strange
multi-coloured insects, lay by the streams to mark the birds,
listened for the howlings of the monkeys when night fell; picked
the strange flowers, admired the butterflies floating like little
blue and yellow albatrosses, their wings opened and poised in the
still air, or wondered when a topaz-coloured humming-bird, a red
macaw, an orange-and-black toucan, or a red-crested cardinal
flitted across our path. Inside the wood behind the house were
clearings, made partly by the axe and partly by fire, amongst the
tall morosimos, coronillos, and palo santos, and in the clearings
known as “roças” grew beans and maize, with
mandioca and occasionally barley, and round them ran a prickly
hedge either of cactuses or thorny bush, cut down to keep out
tapirs and deer, and usually in a straw hut a negro lay, armed
with a flint-lock gun to fire at parrots, scare off monkeys, and
generally to act as guardian of the place. Orange and lemon
trees, with citrons and sweet limes, grew plentifully, and had
run wild amongst the woods; bananas were planted in the
roça; but what we liked the best was a wild fruit called
Guavirami, which grew in patches on the open camp, yellow and
round, about the size of a small plum, low-growing, having three
or four small stones, cold as an icicle to taste upon the hottest
day. A little river ran through the middle of the wood, and
in a stream a curious machine was placed for pounding maize,
driven by water-power, and unlike any contrivance of a similar
nature I had ever seen before. An upright block of wood,
burned from the centre of a tree, stood in the stream, hollowed
out in the centre to contain the maize; water ran up a little
channel, and released a pestle, which fell with a heavy thud upon
the corn, with the result that if one left a basket full in the
great mortar over-night, by morning it was pounded, saving that
labour which God Himself seems to have thought not so ennobling
after all, as He first instituted it to carry out a curse.
So one day told, and may, for all I know, have certified
another, but we recked little of them, riding into Cruz Alta now
and then and eating cakes at the confectioner’s, drinking
innumerable glasses of sweet Malaga, laying in stores of
cigarettes, frequenting all the dances far and near, joining in
cattle-markings, races, and anything in short which happened in
the place.
Perhaps our greatest friend was one Luis, a slave, born in
Angola, brought over quite “Bozal” (or muzzled, as
the Brazilians say of negroes who can speak no Portuguese), then
by degrees became “ladino,” was baptized, bought by
our host Xavier, and had remained with him all the remainder of
his life. Black, and not comely in the least, bowlegged
from constant riding, nose flat, and ears like flappers, a row of
teeth almost as strong as a young shark’s, flat feet, and
crisp Angola wool which grew so thickly on his head that had you
thrown a pin on it, it could not have reached the skin, he yet
was honest and faithful to the verge of folly; but then, if
heaven there be, it can be but inhabited by fools, for wise men,
prudent folk, and those who thrive, have their reward like
singers, quickly, and can look for nothing more. He spoke
about himself half-pityingly under the style of “Luis o
Captivo,” was pious, fervent in sacred song, instant in
prayer (especially if work was to be done), not idle either,
superstitious and affectionate with all the virtues of the most
excellent Saint Bernard or Newfoundland dog, and with but little
of the imperfections of a man except the power of speech.
Often he had been with his master into Uruguay to purchase
cattle, or to buy mules for the Brazilian market, and when I
asked him if he did not know that he was free the instant that he
stepped in Uruguay, said: “Yes, but here I was brought up
when I first came from Africa; they have been kind to me, it is
to me as the querencia [46] is to a horse, and
were it not for that, small fear I should return, to remain here
‘feito captivo’; but then I love the place, and, as
you know, ‘the mangy calf lived all the winter, and then
died in the spring.’” He held the Christian
faith in its entirety, doubting no dogma, being pleased with
every saint, but yet still hankered after fetish, which he
remembered as a child, and seemed to think not incompatible with
Christianity, as rendering it more animistic and familiar,
smoothing away its angularities, blotting whatever share of
reason it may have away, and, above all, giving more scope, if
possible, to faith, and thereby opening a larger field of
possibilities to the believer’s mind.
So Luis with others of his kind, as Jango, Jico, and Manduco,
became our friends, looking upon us with that respect mixed with
contempt which is the attitude of those who see that you possess
the mysterious arts of reading and of writing, but cannot
see a horse’s footprint on hard ground; or if you lose
yourself, have to avail yourself of what Luis referred to as
“the one-handed watch the sailors use, which points the way
to go.”
Much did Xavier talk of the Indians of the woods, the
“Bugres,” as the Brazilians call them; about the
“Botocudos,” who wear a plug stuck in their lower
lip, and shape their ears with heavy weights in youth, so that
they hang upon their shoulders; and much about those
“Infidel” who through a blowpipe direct a little
arrow at the travelling “Christians” in the woods,
whose smallest touch is death. It then appeared his father
(fica agora na gloria) was a patriot, that is, ’twas he who
extirpated the last of all the “Infidel” from the
forests where they lived. Most graphically did he tell how
the last Indians were hunted down with dogs, and in a pantomime
he showed how they jumped up and fell when they received the
shot, and putting out his tongue and writhing hideously, he
imitated how they wriggled on the ground, explaining that they
were worse to kill than is a tapir, and put his father and the
other patriots to much unnecessary pain. And as he talked,
the woods, the fields, the river and the plain bathed in the sun,
which unlike that of Africa does not seem weary of its task, but
shines unwearied, looking as it does on a new world and life,
shimmered and blazed, great lizards drank its rays flattening themselves
upon the stones in ecstasy, humming-birds quivered at the heart
of every flower; above the stream the dragon-flies hung poised;
only some “Infidel” whom the patriots had destroyed
seemed wanting, and the landscape looked incomplete without a
knot of them in their high feather crowns stealthily stealing
round a corner of the woods.
In the uncomprehended future, incomprehensible and strange,
and harder far to guess at than the remotest semi-comprehended
past, surely the Spanish travellers and their writings will have
a value quite apart from that of any other books. For then
the world will hold no “Bugres”; not a
“Botocudo” will be left, and those few Indian and
Negro tribes who yet persist will be but mere travesties of the
whites: their customs lost, their lore, such as it was, despised;
and we have proved ourselves wiser than the Creator, who wasted
so much time creating beings whom we judged unfit to live, and
then, in mercy to ourselves and Him, destroyed, so that no
evidence of His miscalculated plan should last to shame Him when
He thought of His mistake. So to this end (unknowingly) the
missionary works, and all the Jesuits, those who from Paraguay
through the Chiquitos, and across the Uruguay, in the dark Moxos,
and in the forests of the Andes, gave their lives to bring as
they thought life everlasting to the Indians—all were
fools. Better by far instead of Bibles, lives of saints,
water of baptism, crucifixes, and all the tackle of their trade,
that they had brought swords, lances, and a good cross-bow each,
and gone to work in the true scientific way, and recognized that
the right way with savages is to preach heaven to them and then
despatch them to it, for it is barbarous to keep them standing
waiting as it were, just at the portals of eternal bliss.
And as we lingered at Cruz Alta, Christmas drew near, and all
the people began to make “pesebres,” with ox and ass,
the three wise men, the star of Bethlehem, the Redeemer (not of
the Botocudos and the Bugres) swaddled and laid in straw.
Herdsmen and negroes dismounted at the door, fastened their
half-wild mules or horses carefully to posts, removed their hats,
drawing them down over their faces furtively, and then walked in
on tiptoe, their heavy iron spurs clanking upon the ground, to
see the Wondrous Child. They lounged about the room,
speaking in whispers as he might awake, and then departed
silently, murmuring that it was “fermosisimo,” and
getting on their horses noiselessly were gone, and in a minute
disappeared upon the plain. Then came the Novena with
prayer and carols, the prayers read by Xavier himself out of a
tattered book, all the assembled family joining with unction in
the responses, and beating on their breasts. Luis and all
the slaves joined in the carols lustily, especially in one sung
in a minor key long-drawn-out as a sailor’s shanty, or a
forebitter sung in a calm whilst waiting for a breeze.
After each verse there was a kind of chorus calling upon the
sinner to repent, bidding him have no fear but still hold on, and
thus exhorting him—
“Chegai, Chegai, pecador, áo pe da
cruz
Fica nosso Senhor.”
Christmas Day found us all at mass in the little church,
horses and mules being tied outside the door to the trees in the
plaza, and some left hobbled, and all waiting as if St. Hubert
was about to issue forth and bless them.
Painfully and long, the preacher dwelt upon the glorious day,
the country people listening as it were new to them, and as if
all the events had happened on the plain hard by. In the
evening rockets announced the joyful news, and the stars shone
out over the woods and plains as on the evening when the bright
particular star guided the three sheikhs to some such place as
was the rancho of our host.
Christmas rejoicings over, a month sped past and found us
still, so to speak, wind-bound in the little town. No one
would buy our horses, some of which died bitten by snakes.
It was impossible to think of going on, and to return equally
difficult, so that there seemed a probability of being obliged to
pass a lifetime in the place. People began to look at us
half in a kindly, half contemptuous way, as people look in
general upon those who fail, especially when they themselves have
never tried to do anything at all but live, and having done it
with considerable success look upon failure as a sort of minor
crime, to be atoned for by humility, and to be reprobated after
the fashion of adultery, with a half-deprecating laugh.
Sometimes we borrowed ancient flint-lock guns and lay in wait for
tapirs, but never saw them, as in the thick woods they move as
silently as moles in sand, and leave as little trace. Luis
told of how, mounted on a half-wild horse, he had long ago
lassoed a tapir, and found himself and horse dragged slowly and
invincibly towards a stream, the horse resisting terrified, the
“gran besta” [51] apparently quite
cool, so that at last he had to cut his lasso and escape from
what he called the greatest peril of his life; he thought he was
preserved partly by the interposition of the saints and partly by
a “fetiço” which, in defiance of religion, he
luckily had hanging round his neck.
Just when all hope was gone, and we thought seriously of
leaving the horses to their fate, and pushing on with some of the
best of them towards Rio, a man appeared upon the scene, and
offered to buy them, half for money and half “a
troco,” that is barter, for it appeared he was a pawnbroker
and had a house full of silver horse-gear, which had never
been redeemed. After much bargaining we closed for three
hundred dollars and a lot of silver bridles, spurs, whips, and
other stuff, after reserving four of the best horses for
ourselves to make our journey back. At the head of so much
capital our spirits rose, and we determined to push on to
Paraguay, crossing the Uruguay and Parana, ride through the
Misiones, and at Asuncion, where I had friends, take ship;
aguas abajo, for the River Plate. We paid our debts
and bid good-bye to Xavier, his wife and sallow daughters, and to
all the slaves; gave Luis a silver-mounted whip, bought some
provisions, put on our silver spurs, bridles, and as much as
possible of the silver gear we had become possessed of, and at
daybreak, mounted upon a cream-and-white piebald, the “Bayo
Overo,” and a red bay known as the “Pateador,”
leading a horse apiece, we passed out of Xavier’s
“potrero,” [52] and started on the
road.
During the last few days at Xavier’s we had taught the
horses we intended to take to Paraguay to eat Indian corn,
fastening them up without any other food all day, and putting
salt into their mouths. The art once learnt, we had to
stand beside them whilst they ate, to keep off chickens and pigs
who drove them from their food, the horses being too stupid to
help themselves. If I remember rightly, their ration was
eight cobs, which we husked for them in our hands, blistering our fingers
in the process as they had been burned. But now the trouble
of the process was repaid, the horses going strongly all day
long. We passed out of the little plain, skirted a
pine-wood, rode up a little hill, and saw the country stretching
towards the Uruguay, a park-like prairie interspersed with
trees. Cruz Alta, a white patch shining against the
green-grey plain encircled with its woods, was just in sight, the
church-tower standing like a needle in the clear air against the
sky. Half a league more and it dropped out of view, closing
the door upon a sort of half Bœotian Arcady, but remaining
still a memory after twenty years, with all the little incidents
of the three months’ sojourn in the place fresh, and yet
seeming as they had happened not to myself, but to a person I had
met, and who had told the tale.
By easy stages we journeyed on, descending gradually towards
the Uruguay, passing through country almost unpopulated, so large
were the “fazendas,” and so little stocked. In
the last century the Jesuits had here collected many tribes of
Indians, and their history, is it not told in the pages of
Montoya Lozano, Padre Guevara, and the other chroniclers of the
doings of the “Company,” and to be read in the
Archivo de Simancas, in that of Seville, and the uncatalogued
“legajos” of the national library at Madrid?
Throughout the country that we passed through, the fierce
Paulistas had raided in times gone by, carrying off the Christian
Indians to be slaves. The Portuguese and Spaniards had
often fought—witness the names “O matto [54a] Portogues, O matto Castelhano,”
and the like, showing where armies had manoeuvred, whilst the
poor Indians waited like sheep, rejoicing when the butchers
turned the knife at one another’s throats. To-day all
trace of Jesuits and Missions have long disappeared, save for a
ruined church or two, and here and there a grassy mound called in
the language of the country a “tapera,” [54b] showing where a settlement had
stood.
We camped at lonely ranchos inhabited, in general, by free
negroes, or by the side of woods, choosing, if possible, some
little cove in the wood, in which we tied the horses, building a
fire in the mouth, laid down and slept, after concocting a vile
beverage bought in Cruz Alta under the name of tea, but made I
think of birch-leaves, and moistening pieces of the hard jerked
beef in orange-juice to make it palatable.
So after five or six days of steady travelling, meeting, if I
remember rightly, not a living soul upon the way, except a Gaucho
from the Banda Oriental, who one night came to our fire, and
seeing the horrible brew of tea in a tin-pot asked for a little
of the “black water,” not knowing what it was, we
reached the Uruguay. The river, nearly half-a-mile in
breadth, flowed sluggishly between primeval woods, great
alligators basked with their backs awash, flamingoes fished among
the shallow pools, herons and cranes sat on dead stumps, vultures
innumerable perched on trees, and in the purple bunches of the
“seibos” humming-birds seemed to nestle, so rapid was
their flight, and over all a darkish vapour hung, blending the
trees and water into one, and making the “balsa,” as
it laboured over after repeated calls, look like the barque of
Styx. Upon the other side lay Corrientes, once a vast
mission territory, but to-day, in the narrow upper portion that
we traversed, almost a desert, that is a desert of tall grass
with islands of timber dotted here and there, and an occasional
band of ostriches scudding across the plain.
Camped by a wood about a quarter of a league from a lonely
rancho, we were astonished, just at even-fall, by the arrival of
the owner of the house mounted upon a half-wild horse, a spear in
his hand, escorted by his two ragged sons mounted on half-wild
ponies, and holding in their hands long canes to which a broken
sheep-shear had been fixed. The object of his visit, as he
said, was to inquire if we had seen a tiger which had killed some
sheep, but his suspicious glance made me think he thought we had
designs upon his cattle, and he had come to
reconnoitre us; but our offer of some of the Cruz Alta tea soon
made us friends, and after drinking almost a quart of it, he said
“Muy rico,” and rode back to his house.
The third day’s riding brought us to the little town of
Candelaria, built on a high bank over the Parana. Founded
on Candlemas Day in 1665, it was the chief town of the Jesuit
missions. Here, usually, the “Provincial” [56a] resided, and here the political
business of their enormous territory was done. Stretching
almost from Cruz Alta to within fifty leagues of Asuncion del
Paraguay, and from Yapeyú upon the Uruguay almost to the
“Salto de Guayra” upon the Parana, the territory
embraced an area larger than many a kingdom, and was administered
without an army, solely by about two hundred priests. The
best proof of the success of their administration is that in
these days the Indians, now to be numbered by a few thousand,
were estimated at about two hundred thousand, and peopled all the
country now left desolate, or which at least was desolate at the
time of which I write. Even Azara, [56b] a bitter opponent of their system,
writes of the Jesuit rule—“Although the Fathers had
supreme command, they used their power with a gentleness and
moderation which one cannot but admire.” [56c]
I leave
to the economists, with all the reverend rabble rout of
politicians, statistic-mongers and philanthropists, whether or
not two hundred thousand living Indians were an asset in the
world’s property; and to the pious I put this question, If,
as I suppose, these men had souls just as immortal as our own,
might it not have been better to preserve their bodies, those
earthly envelopes without which no soul can live, rather than by
exposing them to all those influences which the Jesuits dreaded,
to kill them off, and leave their country without population for
a hundred years?
But at the time of which I write neither my partner nor I
cared much for speculations of that kind, but were more occupied
with the condition of our horses, for, by that time, the
“Bayo Overo” and the “Pateador” were
become part and parcel of ourselves, and we thought more about
their welfare than that of all the Indians upon earth.
La Candelaria, at the time when we passed through, was fallen
from its proud estate, and had become a little Gaucho country
town with sandy streets and horses tied at every door—a
barren sun-burnt plaza, with a few Japanese ash-trees and
Paraisos; the “Commandancia” with the Argentine blue-and-white barred flag, and trade-mark rising sun,
hanging down listlessly against the post, and for all remnants of
the Jesuit sway, the college turned into a town-hall, and the
fine church, which seemed to mourn over the godless, careless,
semi-Gaucho population in the streets. Here we disposed of
our spare horses, bidding them good-bye, as they had been old
friends, and got the “Bayo Overo” and the
“Pateador” shod for the first time in their lives, an
operation which took the united strength of half-a-dozen men to
achieve, but was imperative, as their feet, accustomed to the
stone-less plains of Paraguay, had suffered greatly in the
mountain paths. In Candelaria, for the first time for many
months, we sat down to a regular meal, in a building called
“El Hotel Internacional”; drank wine of a suspicious
kind, and seemed to have arrived in Paris, so great the change to
the wild camps beside the forests, or the nights passed in the
lone ranchos of the hilly district of Brazil.
A balsa drawn by a tug-boat took us across the Parana, here
more than a mile broad, to Ytapua, and upon landing we found
ourselves in quite another world. The little Paraguayan
town of Ytapua, called by the Jesuits Encarnacion, lay, with its
little port below it (where my friend Enrico Clerici had his
store), upon a plateau hanging above the stream. The
houses, built of canes and thatched with straw, differed
extremely from the white “azotea” houses of the Candelaria
on the other side. The people, dress, the vegetation, and
the mode of life, differed still more in every aspect. The
Paraguayan, with his shirt hanging outside his white duck
trousers, bare feet, and cloak made of red cloth or baize, his
broad straw hat and quiet manner, was the complete antithesis of
the high-booted, loose-trousered, poncho-wearing Correntino, with
his long knife and swaggering Gaucho air. The one a
horseman of the plains, the other a footman of the forests; the
Correntino brave even to rashness when taken man for man, but so
incapable of discipline as to be practically useless as a
soldier. The other as quiet as a sheep, and individually
patient even to suffering blows, but once gathered together and
instructed in the use of arms, as good a soldier, when well led,
as it is possible to find; active and temperate, brave, and, if
rather unintelligent, eager to risk his life at any time at the
command of any of his chiefs. Such was the material from
which Lopez, coward and grossly incompetent as he was, formed the
battalions which for four years kept both Buenos Ayres and Brazil
at bay, and only yielded when he himself was killed, mounted, as
tradition has it, on the last horse of native breed left in the
land.
But if the people and their dwellings were dissimilar, the
countries in themselves were to the full at least as
different. All through the upper part of Corrientes
the soil is black, and the country open, park-like prairie dotted
with trees; in Ytapua and the surrounding district, the earth
bright red, and the primeval forest stretches close to the
water’s edge. In Corrientes still the trees of the
Pampas are occasionally seen, Talas and ñandubay with
Coronillo and Lapacho; whereas in Paraguay, as by a bound, you
pass to Curupay, [60a] Tatané, [60b] the Tarumá, [60c] the Ñandipá, [60d] the Jacaranda, and the Paratodo with
its bright yellow flowers; whilst upon every tree lianas cling
with orchidaceæ, known to the natives as “flowers of
the air,” and through them all flit great butterflies,
humming-birds dart, and underneath the damp vegetation of the
sub-tropics, emphorbiaceæ, solanaceæ, myrtaceæ,
and flowers and plants to drive a thousand botanists to madness,
blossom and die unnamed. Here, too, the language changed,
and Guarani became the dominant tongue, which, though spoken in
Corrientes, is there used but occasionally, but among Paraguayans
is their native speech, only the Alcaldes, officers, and upper
classes as a general rule (at that time) speaking Spanish, and
even then with a strange accent and much mixed with Guarani.
Two days we passed in Ytapua resting our horses, and I renewed
my friendship with Enrico Clerici, an Italian, who had served
with Garibaldi, and who, three years ago, I had met in the same place
and given him a silver ring which he reported galvanized, and was
accustomed to lend as a great favour for a specific against
rheumatism. He kept a pulperia, and being a born fighter,
his delight was, when a row occurred (which he styled “una
barulla de Jesu Cristo”), to clear the place by flinging
empty bottles from the bar. A handsome, gentlemanlike man,
and terrible with a bottle in his hand, whether as weapon of
offence or for the purposes of drink; withal well educated, and
no doubt by this time long dead, slain by his favourite weapon,
and his place filled by some fat, double-entry Basque or grasping
Catalan, or by some portly emigrant from Germany.
Not wishing to be confined within a house, a prey to the
mosquitoes, we camped in the chief square, and strolling round
about the town, I came on an old friend.
Not far outside the village a Correntino butcher had his shop,
a little straw-thatched hut, with strings of fresh jerked beef
festooning all the place; the owner stood outside dressed in the
costume of a Gaucho of the southern plains. I did not know
him, and we began to talk, when I perceived, tied underneath a
shed, a fine, dark chestnut horse, saddled and bitted in the most
approved of Gaucho style. He somehow seemed familiar, and
the Correntino, seeing me looking at his horse, asked if I knew
the brand, but looking at it I failed to recognize it,
when on a sudden my memory was lighted up. Three years ago,
in an “estero” [62] outside
Caapucú, at night, journeying in company with a friend,
one Hermann, whose only means of communication with me was a
jargon of Spanish mixed with “Plaat Deutsch,” we met
a Correntino, and as our horses mutually drowned our approach by
splashing with their feet, our meeting terrified us both.
Frightened, he drew his knife, and I a pistol, and Hermann lugged
out a rusty sword, which he wore stuck through his horse’s
girths. But explanations followed, and no blood was shed,
and then we drew aside into a little hillock, called in the
language of the place an “albardon,” sat down and
talked, and asking whence he came was told from Ytapua. Now
Ytapua was three days’ journey distant on an ordinary
horse, and I looked carefully at the horse, and wondered why his
owner had ridden him so hard. He, I now saw, was the horse
I had seen that night, and the Correntino recognized me, and
laughing said he had killed a man near Ytapua, and was (as he
said) “retreating” when he met me in the marsh.
The horse, no doubt, was one of the best for a long journey I
have ever seen, and after quoting to his owner that “a dark
chestnut horse may die, but cannot tire,” [63a] we separated, and, no doubt, for years
afterwards our meeting was the subject of his talk.
No doubt the citizens of Ytapua were scandalized at our not
coming to the town, and the Alcalde came to interview us, but we
assured him that in virtue of a vow we slept outside, and in a
moment all his fears were gone.
Striking right through the then desolated Misiones, passing
the river Aguapey, our horses almost swimming, skirting by
forests where red macaws hovered like hawks and parrots
chattered; passing through open plains grown over here and there
with Yatais, [63b] splashing for hours through wet
esteros, missing the road occasionally, as I had travelled it but
once, and then three years ago, and at the time I write of huts
were few and far between, and population scanty, we came, upon
the evening of the second day, near to a place called
Ñacuti. This was the point for which I had been
making, for near it was an estancia [63c] called the
“Potrero San Antonio,” the property of Dr. Stewart, a
well-known man in Paraguay. Nature had seemed to work to
make the place impregnable. On three sides of the land,
which measured eight or ten miles in length on every side, forks
of a river
ran, and at the fourth they came so close together that a short
fence, not half-a-mile in length, closed up the circle, and
cattle once inside were safe but for the tigers, which at that
time abounded, and had grown so fierce by reason of the want of
population that they sometimes killed horses or cows close to the
door of the house. A short “picada,” of about a
quarter of a mile in length, cut through the wood, led to the
gate. Through it in times gone by I often rode at night in
terror, with a pistol in my hand, the heavy foliage of the trees
brushing my hat, and thinking every instant that a tiger would
jump out. One night when close up to the bamboo bars I
heard a grunt, thought my last hour had come, fired, and brought
something down; approached, and found it was a peccary; and then,
tearing the bars down in a hurry, got to horse, and galloped nine
miles to the house, thinking each moment that the herd of
peccaries was close behind and panting for my blood.
On this occasion all was still; the passage through the orange
trees was dark, their scent oppressive, as the leaves just
stirred in the hot north wind, and fire-flies glistened to and
fro amongst the flowers; great bats flew heavily, and the quarter
of a mile seemed mortal, and as if it led to hell.
Nothing occurred, and coming to the bars we found them on the
ground; putting them up we conscientiously cursed the fool who
left them out of place, and riding out into the moonlight, after a
little trouble found the sandy, deep-banked trail which led up to
the house. All the nine miles we passed by islands of great
woods, peninsulas and archipelagos jutting out into the still
plain, and all their bases swathed in white mists like water: the
Yatais looked ghostly standing starkly in the grass; from the
lagoons came the shrill croak of frogs, great moths came
fluttering across our path, and the whole woods seemed filled
with noise, as if the dwellers in them, silent through the day,
were keeping holiday at night. As for the past two days we
had eaten nothing but a few oranges and pieces of jerked beef,
moistening them in the muddy water of the streams, our talk was
of the welcome we should get, the supper, and of the comfortable
time we then should pass for a few days to give our horses
rest.
We passed the tiger-trap, a structure built after the fashion
of an enormous mouse-trap, of strong bamboos; skirted along a
wood in which an ominous growling and rustling made our horses
start, and then it struck me as curious that there were no cattle
feeding in the plain, no horses, and that the whole potrero
seemed strangely desolate; but the house just showing at the edge
of a small grove of peach-trees drove all these speculations out
of my head: thinking upon the welcome, and the dinner, for we had
eaten nothing since daybreak, and were fasting, as the natives
say, from everything but sin, we reached the door. The house
was dark, no troop of dogs rushed out to bark and seize our
horses’ tails; we shouted, hammered with our whips, fired
our revolvers, and nothing answered us.
Dismounting, we found everything bolted and barred, and going
to the back, on the kitchen-hearth a few red embers, and thus
knew that some one had been lately in the place. Nothing to
eat, the woods evidently full of tigers, and our horses far too
tired to start again, we were just about to unsaddle and lie down
and sleep, when a white figure stole out from the peach-trees,
and tried to gain the shelter of the corral some sixty yards
away. Jumping on horseback we gave chase, and coming up
with the fugitive found it to be a Paraguayan woman, who with her
little daughter were the sole inhabitants, her husband having
gone to the nearest village to buy provisions, and left her all
alone, warning her earnestly before he left to keep the doors
shut during the night on account of the tigers, and not to
venture near the woods even in daylight till he should have come
back. Finding herself confronted by two armed, mounted men,
dressed in the clothes of Correntinos, who had an evil reputation
in Paraguay, her terror was extreme. Her daughter, a little
girl of eight or nine, crept out from behind a tree, and in a
moment we were friends. Unluckily for us, she had no food
of any kind, and but a little maté, which she prepared for
us. She then remembered that the trees were covered with
peaches, and went out and gathered some, but they were hard as
stones; nevertheless we ate a quantity of them, and having tied
our horses close to the house, not twenty paces from the door, in
long lush grass, we lay down in the verandah, and did not wake
till it was almost noon. When we awoke we found the woman
had been up betimes and gone on foot five or six miles away to
look for food. She brought some mandioca, and two or three
dozen oranges, and a piece of almost putrefied jerked beef, all
which we ate as heartily as if it had been the most delicious
food on earth.
To my annoyance I found my horse weak and dejected, and
several large clots of dried-up blood under the hair of his mane,
and saw at once a vampire bat had fixed upon him, and no doubt
sucked almost a quart of blood. We washed him in a pond
close to the house, and he got better, and after eating some of
the hard and unripe peaches we again lay down to sleep. By
evening the woman’s husband had returned, and proved to be
a little lame and withered-looking man, mounted upon a lean and
skinny horse. He undertook to guide us to Asuncion,
remarking that it was twenty years since he had seen the capital,
but that he knew the road as if he was accustomed to go there
every day. With a slight lapsus this turned out to be the
case, and just at daybreak we left the Potrero San Antonio,
where once before I had passed a month roaming about the woods,
waiting for tigers in a tree at night, and never thinking that,
in three years’ time, I should return and find it
desolate. It seemed that Dr. Stewart, not finding the
speculation pay, had sold his cattle, and his manager, one
Oliver, a Californian “Forty-niner,” and his
Paraguayan wife, had removed to a place some twenty leagues away,
upon the road towards Asuncion.
There we determined to go and rest our horses, and left the
place, our guide Florencio’s wife impressing on him to be
sure and bring her back a little missal from the capital, and he,
just like an Arab or an Indian leaving home, unmoved, merely
observing that the folk in Asuncion were “muy ladino”
(very cunning), and it behoved a Christian to take care.
A day’s long march brought us near Santa Rosa, and our
guide here fell into his first and only error on the road.
Pursuing an interminable palm-wood, we came out upon a little
plain, all broken here and there with stunted Yatais, then to our
great disgust the road bifurcated, and our guide insisted on
striking to the left, though I was almost certain it was
wrong. After an hour of heavy ploughing through the sand, I
suddenly saw two immense palm-trees about a league away upon the
right, and luckily remembered that they stood one on each side of
the old Jesuit church at Santa Rosa, and after an hour of scrambling
through a stony wood arrived at the crossing of the little river
just outside the place. Girls carrying water-jars upon
their heads, and dressed in long white shifts, embroidered round
the neck with coarse black lace, were going and coming in a long
procession to the stream. A few old men and about thirty
boys composed almost the entire male population of the
town. Women entirely ruled the roost, and managed
everything, and, as far as I can now recall, did it not much more
inefficiently than men. The curious wooden church, dark,
and with overhanging eaves, and all the images of saints still
left from Jesuit times in choir and nave, with columns hewn from
the trunks of massive trees, stood in the centre of the village,
which was built after the fashion of a miner’s
“row,” or of a St. Simonian phalanstery, each
dwelling at least a hundred feet in length, and all partitioned
off in the inside for ten or fifteen families. The plaza
was overgrown with grass, and on it donkeys played, chasing each
other up and down, and sometimes running up the wooden steps of
the great church, and stumbling down again. Those who had
horses led them down to bathe, cut “pindo” [69] for them, rode them at evening time,
and passed their time in dressing and in combing them to get them
into condition for the Sunday’s running at the ring, which
sport introduced by the Jesuits has continued popular in all the villages
of the Misiones up to the present time. The women flirted
with the men, who by their rarity were at a premium, gave
themselves airs, and went about surrounded by a perpetual and
admiring band. The single little shop, which contained
needles, gunpowder, and gin, was kept by an Italian, who, as he
told me, liked the place, lent money, was a professing and quite
unabashed polygamist, and I have no doubt long ere this time has
made a fortune, and retired to live at Genoa in the self-same
green velvet suit in which he left his home.
In this Arcadia we remained some days, and hired several girls
to bathe the horses, which they performed most conscientiously,
splashing and shouting in the stream for hours at a time, and
bringing back the horses clean, and garnished with flowers in
their manes. I rode one day to see a village two or three
leagues away, where report said some of the Jesuit books had been
preserved; got lost, and passed the night in a small clearing,
where a fat and well-cared-for-looking handsome roan horse was
tied. On seeing me he broke his picket-rope, ran furiously
four or five times round me in circles, and then advancing put
his nostrils close to the nostrils of my horse, and seemed to
talk to him. His owner, an old Paraguayan, lame from a
wound received in jumping from a canoe onto the deck of a
Brazilian ironclad, told me his horse had been with him far into
the interior, and for a year had never seen another horse. But, he
said, “Tata Dios has given every animal its speech after
its kind, and he is glad to see your horse, and is no doubt
asking him the news.”
During the night, I cannot say exactly what the two horses
talked about, but the old Paraguayan talked for hours of his
adventures in the lately terminated war. It appeared that
he, with seven companions, thinking to take a Brazilian ironclad
anchored in the Paraguay, concealed themselves in a small canoe,
behind some drift-wood, and floating plants called
“camalotes,” drifted down with the stream, and coming
to the ship jumped with a yell aboard. The Brazilians,
taken by surprise, all ran below, and the poor Paraguayans
thinking the ship was theirs, sat quietly down upon the deck to
plan what they should do. Seeing them off their guard, some
of the crew turned a gun upon them, and at the first fire killed
six, and wounded my host, who sprang into the stream, and gained
the bank, but most unluckily not on the Paraguayan side. As
at that time the Chaco Indians, who had profited by the war to
make invasions upon every side, killed every Christian, as my
host said “sin perdon,” so he remained half starving
for a night and day. On the third morning, wounded as he
was, and seeing he must starve or else be killed if seen by
Indians, he got a fallen tree, and with great difficulty, and
marvellously escaping the fierce fish who come like wolves to the
scent of blood, and unmolested by the alligators, he reached the
other side. There he was found by some women, lying
unconscious on the river-bank, was cured, and though scarred in a
dozen places, and lame for life, escaped, as he informed me, by
his devotion to San José, whom he described under the
title of the “husband of the mother of our Lord.”
In the morning he rode a league with me upon the way, and as
we parted his horse neighed shrilly, reared once or twice, and
plunged, and when we separated I looked back and saw the devotee
of St. Joseph sitting as firmly as a centaur, as his horse loped
along the sandy palm-tree-bordered trail. During our stay
at Santa Rosa, which was an offshoot from the more important
mission of Santa Maria de Fé, although they had no priest
the people gathered in the church, the Angelus was rung at
evening for the “oracion,” and every one on hearing
it took off his hat and murmured something that he thought
apposite. Thus did ceremony, always much more important
than mere faith, continue, and no doubt blessed the poor people
to the full as much as if it had been duly sanctified by a
tonsured priest, and consecrated by a rightly constituted
offertory. We left the place with real regret, and to this
day, when in our hurried life I dream of peace, my thoughts go
back to the old Paraguayan Jesuit “capilla” lost in
the woods of Morosimo, Curupay, and Yba-hai, and with its two
tall feathery palm-trees rustling above the desecrated church; to
the long strings of white-robed women carrying water-jars, and to
the old-world life, perhaps by this time altered and swept away,
or yet again not altered, and passing still in the same quiet
fashion as when we were there.
Little by little we left the relatively open country of the
Misiones behind, and passing Ibyra-pucú, San Roque, and
Ximenes, came to the river Tebicuary. We passed it in
canoes, the horses swimming, with their backs awash and heads
emerging like water-monsters, whilst an impassive Indian paddled
in the stern, and a young girl stood in the bows wielding a
paddle like a water-sprite. The river passed, we got at
once into the forests, and followed winding and narrow paths,
worn by the footsteps of the mules of ages so deeply that our
heavy Gaucho spurs almost trailed on the ground, whilst overhead
lianas now and then quite formed a roof, and in the heavy air
winged animals of every kind made life a burden. At last,
leaving the little town of Quiquyó upon the right, we
emerged on to a high and barren plain near Caapucú.
On the evening of the second day from where we crossed the river,
we came to Caballero Punta, just underneath a range of flattish
hills, and riding to the door at a sharp gallop, pulled up short,
and found ourselves greeted by the ex-manager of the Potrero San
Antonio, my friend the “Forty-niner,” and for the
first time for four months saw a familiar face. Gentle and
kindly, though quick on the trigger, as befitted one who had
crossed the plains in ’48 on foot, and with his whole
possessions packed on a bullock, passing the Rocky Mountains
alone, and through the hostile tribes at that time powerful and
savage, John Oliver was one of those strange men who, having
passed their lives in perils and privations, somehow draw from
them that very kindliness which those living in what appear more
favourable surroundings so often lack. Born somewhere in
the Yorkshire Dales (these he remembered well), and as he thought
“back somewhere in the twenties,” he had suffered all
his life from the strange fever which impels some men to search
for gold. Not on the Stock Exchange, or any of those places
where it might reasonably be expected to be found, but in
Australia, California, Mexico, in short wherever life was hard,
death easy, and experience to be gathered, he sought with pick
and shovel, rocker and pan and cradle, the “yellow
iron,” as the Apaches used to call it, which sought and
found after the fashion of his kind, enriches some one
else. From California he had drifted to Peru, from thence
to Chile, but finding silver-mining too laborious or too
lucrative for his conversing, and hearing of a fertile diggings
opened in the Republic of Uruguay, had migrated there, and
arrived somehow in Paraguay to find that the enchantment of his
life was done, and settled down to live. Tall, and with
long grey hair hanging in Western fashion down his
back, a careful horseman after the style of the trappers of the
West, his pale blue eyes looked out upon the world as with an air
of doubt; yet he had served in San Francisco as a
“vigilante,” sojourned with Brigham Young in Salt
Lake City, leaving as he confessed two or three wives among the
saints, sat in Judge Lynch’s court a dozen times, most
probably had killed a man or two; still, to my fancy, if the meek
are to inherit any portion of the earth, his share should not be
small.
He made us welcome, and his wife waited upon us, never
presuming to sit down and eat, but standing ready with a napkin
fringed with lace, to wipe our hands, pressing the food upon us,
and behaving generally as if she found herself in the presence of
some strange beings of an unfamiliar race. He said he had
no children and was glad of it, for he explained that
“Juaneeter was a good woman, but ‘uneddicated,’
and he had never taken thoroughly to half-caste pups, though he
remembered some born of a Pi-Ute woman, way back somewhere about
the fifties, who he supposed by now were warriors, and had taken
many scalps.” His wife stood by, not understanding
any English and but little Spanish, which he himself spoke badly,
and their talk was held in a strange jargon mixed with Guarani,
without a verb, without a particle, and yet sufficient for the
two simple creatures whom a strange fate, or a discerning,
ever-watchful Providence, had thus ordained to meet.
No books were in the place, except a Bible, which he read little
of late years, partly from failing sight, and partly, as he said,
because he had detected what seemed to him
“exaggerations,” chiefly in figures and as to the
number of the unbelievers whom the Chosen People slew. Two
days or more, for time was taken no account of in his house, we
waited with him, talking late every night of Salt Lake, Brigham
Young, the Mountain-meadows Massacre, Kit Carson, Cochise and
Mangas Coloradas, and matters of that kind which interested him,
and which, when all is said, are just as interesting to those
attuned to them, as is polemical theology, theories of art,
systems of jurisprudence, the origin of the Atoll Islands, or any
of the wise futilities with which men stock their minds. We
parted on the third or fourth, or perhaps the fifth or sixth day,
knowing that we should never meet again, and taking off my silver
spurs I gave them to him, and he presented me with a light summer
poncho woven by his wife. Much did he thank me for my
visit, and made me swear never to pass the district without
stopping at his house. This I agreed to do, and if I pass
again either by Caballero Punta or by Caapucú, I will keep
faith; but he, I fear, will have deceived me, and in the
churchyard of the “capilla,” under a palm-tree, with
a rough cross above him, I shall find my simple friend.
Three or four days of jogging steadily, passing by Quindy,
and through the short “estero” of Acaai, which we
passed splashing for several hours up to the girths, brought us
to Paraguari, which, with its saddle-shaped mountain overhanging
it, stood out a mark for leagues upon the level plain.
Seldom in any country have I seen a railway so fall into the
landscape as did the line at the little terminus of this the only
railway in all Paraguay. The war had left the country
almost in ruins, business was at a standstill, food was scarce,
and but for a bale or two of tobacco, and a hide-sack or two of
yerba, the train went empty to and fro. But as the people
always wanted to go to the capital in search of work, six or
eight empty trucks were always sent with every train. On
them the people (mostly women) swarmed, seated like flies, upon
the top and sides, dangling their legs outside like people
sitting on a wharf, talking incessantly, all dressed in white,
and every one, down to the smallest children, smoking large
cigars. Six hours the passage took, if all went well, the
distance being under fifty miles. If aught went wrong, it
took a day or more, and at the bridges the trucks were all
unhooked and taken over separately, so rotten was the state of
the whole line, and in addition every here and there bridges had
been blown away during the war, and roughly rendered serviceable
by shoring up with wood. To meet a train labouring and
puffing through the woods, the people clustering like bees upon
the trucks, the engineer seated in shirt-sleeves, whilst some women
stoked the fire, was much the same as it is to meet a caravan
meandering across the sands. If you desired to talk with
any one the train incontinently stopped, the passengers got out,
relit their cigarettes, the women begged, the time of day was
passed, and curiosity thus satisfied you passed on upon the road,
and the “Maquina-guazu,” [78] as it was called,
pursued contentedly the jolting and uneven tenor of its
way. We naturally despised it, though the conductor,
scenting business, offered to take us and our horses at almost
any price we chose.
By the Laguna Ypocarai we took our way; skirting along its
eastern shores, then desolate, and the whole district almost
depopulated, we passed by palm-groves and deserted mandioca
patches, reed cottages in ruins, watched the flamingoes fishing
in the lake, the alligators lying motionless, and saw an Indian
all alone in a dug-out canoe, casting his line as placidly as he
had lived before the coming of the Spaniards to the land. A
red-blue haze hung on the waters of the lake, reflected from the
bright red earth, peeping between the trees, and on the islands
drifts of mist gave an effect as if the palms were parachutes
dropped from balloons, or perhaps despatched from earth to find
out whether in the skies there could be anything more lovely than
this quiet inland sea. Close to the top end of the lake
stands Aregua, once under the Mercenary friars of Asuncion,
who, as Azara says, having made the people of the place work for
them for near two hundred years, began to think they were indeed
their slaves, till an official sent from Spain in 1783 gave them
their liberty, and the Mercenaries (as he says) at once retreated
in disgust. Here we fell in with a compatriot, who at our
time of meeting him was drunk. He told us that he passed
his time after the fashion of the patriarchs in the Old
Testament, and on arriving at his house it seemed he was provided
with several wives, but of the flocks and herds, and other
trade-marks of his supposed estate, we saw no trace. Still
he was hospitable, setting the women to cut down pindo for the
horses, take them to water, bathe them, and finally to cook some
dinner for ourselves. His chief complaint was that his
wives were Catholics, and now and then trudged off to mass, and
left him without any one to cook his food. I doubted
personally if a change of creed would better things, but held my
peace, seeing the man set store by the faith which he had learnt
in youth and still said he practised, but, as far as I could see,
only by cursing the religion of the people of the place. We
left his house without regret, though he was hospitable and half
drunk for nearly all the time that we were there, and started on
our last day’s march considerably refreshed by meeting one
who in a foreign land, far from home ties and moral influences,
yet still pursued the simple practice of the faith which he had
learned at home.
Luque,
upon its little hill, the Campo Grande, like a dry lake,
surrounded by thick woods on every side, and then the Recoleta,
we passed, and entering the red sandy road made at the conquest
to move troops upon, we saw the churches of Asuncion only a
league away. And yet we lingered, walking our horses slowly
in the deep red sand, passing the strings of countrywomen with
baskets on their heads, driving their donkeys packed with
sugar-cane, and smoking as they went; we lingered, feeling that
the trip was done; not that we minded that our fortunes were not
made, but vaguely felt that for the last five months we had lived
a time which in our lives we should not see again, and fearing
rather than looking forward to all the approaching change.
The horses too were fat, in good condition, had become old
friends, knew us so well we never tied them, but all night in
camp left them to feed, being certain that they would not stray;
and thus to leave them at the end of a long trip seemed as
unreasonable as to part from an old friend simply because death
calls.
The road grew wider, passed through some scattered houses,
buried in orange and guayaba trees, ran through some open patches
where grew wild indigo and castor-oil plants, with a low
palm-scrub, entered a rancheria just outside the town, and then
turned to a sandy street which merged in a great market, where,
as it seemed, innumerable myriads were assembled, all chattering
at once, or so it struck us coming from the open solitary plains and
the dark silent woods. The lowness of the river having
stopped the Brazilian mail-boat from coming down from Corumba, we
put up at the “Casa Horrocks,” the resort of all the
waifs and strays storm-bound in Paraguay. The town buried
in vegetation, the sandy streets, all of them watercourses after
a night’s rain, the listless life, the donkeys straying to
and fro, the white-robed women, with their hair hanging down
their backs, and cut square on the forehead after the style so
usual amongst Iceland ponies, the great unfinished palaces, the
squares with grass five or six inches high, and over all the
reddish haze blending the palm-trees, houses, sandy streets, the
river and the distant Chaco into a copper-coloured whole at
sunset, rise to my memory like the reflection of a dream. A
dream seen in a convex mirror, opening away from me as years have
passed, the actual things, men, actions, and occurrences of daily
life seem swollen in it at the far end of some perspective, but
the impression of the whole fresh and clear-cut in memory,
standing out as boldly as the last day when on the
“Pateador” I had a farewell gallop on the
beach. Adios, “Pateador,” or “till so
long”—horses will be born as good, better, ten
thousand times more valuable, and dogs will eat them, but for
myself, and for the owner of the “Bayo Overo,” not
all the coursers of the sun could stir the reminiscences of
youth, of lonely camping-grounds, long nights in drenching rain,
struggles with wind, wild gallops in the dark; the hopes and
fears of the five months when we went fortune-seeking, and by
God’s mercy failed in our search, as the mere mention of
those names forgotten to all the world except ourselves.
Eight or ten days had passed away, and we grew quite familiar
with the chief features of the place, having made acquaintance
with the Brazilian officers of the army and the fleet, the German
apothecary, with Dr. Stewart, the chief European of the place,
when news came that the Brazilian mail-boat had at last
arrived. We bade our friends good-bye, entrusted both our
horses to the care of Horrocks, fed them ourselves for the last
time, and went on board the ship; a coppery haze hung over
everything, the heat raising a faint quivering in the air, the
thick yellowish water of the stream lapping against the
vessel’s sides like oil, the boat shoved off, our friends
perspiring in the sun raising a washed-out cheer. The
vessel swung into the stream, her paddles turned, the great green
flag with the orange crown imperial flapped at the jackstaff, and
the town dropped rapidly astern.
A quarter of a league and the church towers, tall palm-trees,
the unfinished palaces, and the great theatre began to fade into
the haze. Then sheering a little to the Left bank, the
vessel passed a narrow tongue of land covered with grass, whereon
two horses fed. As we drew nearer I saw they were our own,
and jumping on the taffrail shouted “Adios,” at which
they raised their heads, or perhaps raised them but at the
snorting steamer, and as they looked we passed racing down
stream, and by degrees they became dimmer, smaller, less
distinct, and at the last melted and vanished into the reddish
haze.
