CHAPTER XXII

FROM THE RIVER PLATE TO THE ANDES

Early in April we made another journey to Buenos Ayres, and thence to Ensenada, the port of La Plata, where, in the company of friends, I had to bid good-bye to my wife, with whom the changeful climate had dealt none too kindly. Just a year before, we had set out to revel in the sunshine of the golden South, and now one of us, after a year of many changing weathers, was gladly setting sail for the grey North, resolved never again to say one word against its climate, while the other would no less willingly have bid good-bye to the River Plate, but that matters of importance held him to South America and the promise of many new scenes and far journeyings for well-nigh another year.

It was with a curious sense of loneliness that I found myself back in Montevideo, not at our old quarters in the Calle Sarandí, but comfortably accommodated in the Hotel Oriental, for some three weeks more, ere I too had to take leave of the River Plate. Those few weeks in that hotel, which is situated hard by the quay and is the favourite house of call for all English and American voyagers making a flying visit to the port, went past much quicker than I had hoped. I found it greatly improved since my earlier visits, so that it had assumed almost an English aspect in the matter of appointments, while the _cuisine_ was excellent. The brother and sister who conduct it showed a very gracious spirit of service to their guests, and I noticed that in view of the increasing popularity of their establishment with English-speaking visitors, the lady was beginning to study their language, of which at that time she knew only a few words, though she spoke French fluently in addition to her native tongue.

Many nights of billiard matches at the English Club linger in my memory of these concluding weeks, and particularly I recall the happy smiling face of one of the members there, who went about radiating joy because he had just managed to arrange for leave of absence in October. His wife—like so many of the wives of the exiles—had been forced to return home a year or so before that time, and the seven months that now separated him from wife and home seemed so short by anticipation, in comparison with the lonely months he had put behind him, that you might have thought he was setting sail next day. I fear there are many sad hearts among the British on the River Plate, and many lives being poorly lived, for one encounters scores of husbands left lonely in these towns because their wives have found the life so little to their taste, or the climate, with its sudden changes from hot to cold, too much for their physical resistance. Can anything be more unsatisfactory than thus to wear away the best years of one’s life? Several Britishers with whom I became acquainted, whose duties kept them on the River Plate, had lived there alone, with only triennial visits to their wives and families in England, for periods ranging from ten to fifteen years. Some of these gentlemen had made, or were making, considerable fortunes, but I must confess I envied none the wealth which they were securing at so great a sacrifice of domestic happiness.

Still, I would not have you think that my thoughts were tinged with melancholy when I stepped aboard the old river steamer _Eolo_, on which so often I had journeyed between the two great cities of the Silver River, after bidding good-bye to a group of friends, among whom was no fellow-countryman, to look for the last time on the dancing lights of the fairy scene which the Bay of Montevideo presents each night to those on shipboard. In Montevideo our time had passed, on the whole, agreeably; excepting one tremendous storm of rain and hail, when fiercest thunder rolled and lightning swept the streets in blinding flashes, it had been a time of sunshine and fair weather,—sunshine tempered with refreshing breezes,—so that, after all, we had found something of which we went in search.

I remember well how changed was the scene on arriving in the early morning at Buenos Ayres, where torrential rain was falling. Through the mud and slush I drove once more to the old, familiar hotel, and nothing but the most essential duties of the day took me out of doors, for it rained “as if the heavens had opened and determined to empty themselves forever,” and next morning I awakened to the rain thundering on the roof with unabated vigour. So it continued all that day, while I made furtive dashes here and there, saying a few hurried good-byes, visiting the bank, arranging travelling accommodation for my journey across the continent and over the Andes to the city of Santiago de Chili. The train was to leave about eight o’clock on the Sunday morning, and so admirable is the accommodation for passengers’ luggage, that if your heavier baggage is not delivered the previous day, it runs great risk of being left behind in the morning. This I discovered somewhat late in the evening, and a hurried packing ensued.

Still in the streaming wet, I saw the last of the sodden city that Sunday morning, and found myself in a particularly crowded train, with three travelling companions. One of these was the most talkative and genial of Argentines I have met, whose family history was speedily at my disposal, and much of whose companionable character came, I doubt not, from the French origin to which he confessed. Full of a delightful admiration for all things English and American, except the language, which he had found too hard a nut to crack, he proved the best of travelling companions, having made the journey from Buenos Ayres to Valparaiso many times before. He was the publicity manager of a very famous Anglo-American firm of advertising chemists, and I can assure them they are admirably served, as I found his knowledge of the journalistic conditions of the Argentine thoroughly sound in every detail on which I was able to test it, and that meant a very representative test, as it had been an important part of my own occupation in the country to familiarise myself with journalistic conditions.

The second of my travelling companions was a typical Argentine of the town-hating variety. There was nothing of the gaucho in his blood, and I judged him to be entirely Spanish in origin, of that fair type which could pass for Anglo-Saxon, but he was a lover of the open spaces and the wild life of the Camp. Wiry and slim, with blue, inquiring eyes, he had travelled far, and was familiar with many parts of North America and Europe, although he had just completed some five years in the wilds of Paraguay and the Gran Chaco, where I believe the lovers of primitive life can have more than their fill. He recounted many of his experiences among the wild Indians of the Chaco, and showed me numerous photographs he had taken there, with all the pride of a schoolboy. Here was none of your desperadoes of the wild places, though he carried a big enough Browning in his belt and the usual long knife of the gaucho in a sheath over his hip. These accoutrements struck me as strangely unsuited to the man, who, in general appearance and in the quietness of his demeanour, would have seemed far more in place perched on a high stool in a counting house.

The third of my companions was a red-headed youth from Christiania, on his way to Valparaiso, where a fellow Norwegian was managing a successful business, and had offered him a post. He spoke English well, but Spanish not at all, and made the most elephantine attempts to pronounce the simplest words, much to the merriment of our other companions, who had at first marked him down _un inglés_. It was something of a wonder to us how he had come so far without mishap, as he showed so little ability to deal with the ordinary difficulties of travel in foreign lands, and, as the Franco-Argentine remarked to me, he had _poca cabeza_, or “little head.” But I suppose there is a special providence that watches over such travellers as he and brings them safely to their journey’s end.

The rain continued as we sped along through the flat and uninteresting country. Every road was a running stream, and ditches were swollen into rivers. Any prospect more dismal or less appealing to the affections than the Argentine Camp in time of rain, I do not know. And at this time the rain meant a great drop in the temperature that sent all Nature a-shivering, so that the dripping herds and the sodden sheep on the far-reaching pasture lands through which we passed were objects of pity, while the mud-splashed horses and the dripping drivers were supreme pictures of wretchedness. From shanties here and there by the railway side, grey faces peeped out at the train, as one of the events in their dreary day, and the little country towns were so many houses in seas of mud. I remember we passed some ostrich farms, and these birds, at no time suggestive of the life joyous, looked the saddest of bipeds. They are of a different breed from those that are reared in South Africa to furnish ladies with their “fine feathers,” and are used for supplying the feather dusters, or _plumeros_, with which lazy servants throughout the Argentine flick the dust from furniture to walls and back again from walls to furniture—an operation of infinite amusement and no utility.

I remember little of our various stopping places, except Junin, the great railway centre of the Buenos Ayres and Pacific Railway on which we were travelling, and where are situated its engineering works. The station was thronged with English people, many of whom had come down to see the train go through, as that is one of the amusements all along the line, the young people in the remoter country towns dressing up to promenade the stations as though these might be pleasure piers. Junin is some four hours’ run from the capital, and is typical of most Argentine towns, with its earthen streets which are periodically ploughed and rolled, and so remain quite passable for a few days after that operation, but for the rest of the year alternate between the conditions of river-bed and dust heap.

The little station of “Open Door” I remember. We could see in the distance the buildings and fields of the great asylum, which I should very much have liked to visit. This is one of the most remarkable institutions in the Argentine, for here many hundreds of insane are employed in all sorts of healthy labour, under the supervision of a famous alienist, whose methods of treatment are entirely original and have been the subject of much discussion. I remember reading in the pages of M. Clemenceau, who wrote a most interesting chapter on his visit to this great asylum, that the superintendent told him so wonderful were the results of studying the tastes of the lunatics entrusted to his care and placing them at congenial occupations, that he often thought he was the only insane person among all the inhabitants of Open Door. Why this English name should have been chosen for the place, I do not know, for surely the association of lunacy and the open door does not seem particularly desirable.

My Franco-Argentine companion was entirely pleased that the rain continued, for that meant a more agreeable journey in passing through the almost desert land across which the railway runs in the heart of the continent, as in dry weather, and despite closed windows, travellers become covered with the fine, black dust which blows through every chink and cranny, making that part of the journey dreaded by all. Even in those days of rain, there was a slight deposit of grey dust on everything in our carriage, but I confess to no recollections of discomfort, not even at meal-times, except that the food set before us was by no means princely, and the fruit in particular would have been thrown in the dustbin by an East Side dealer. Vaguely I remember lighted towns and the darkening night, and then awakening, still in the dark, but with the most delicious of sweet morning airs penetrating the carriage, as we stood still in the station of Mendoza.

This would be nearly six of the morning. There was much hurrying of porters and shifting of luggage from the express into the Transandine train, waiting on the other side of the platform. In the dining car of this, coffee was steaming and rolls and butter ready for the travellers. We speedily secured our seats for the mountain journey on which the Transandine train had to set out about seven o’clock. And now, in the grey light, one could see in all directions the dim forms of rugged hills, and presently the dawn came, swiftly and bright, lighting up the nearer vine-clad hills, and showing us great dim mountain masses westward, where the mighty Andes stood between us and the Pacific. It was a beautiful scene, and thrilled me with that strange feeling which the hills must ever bring to those who have been born and lived among them, especially after a year in which I had not set eyes on any rising ground save the little hummock of the Cerro in the Bay of Montevideo.

The time left to one for a glimpse of the town was of the briefest, and it was a sleeping town I saw. I had intended to spend two days in Mendoza on my way into Chili, and made all arrangements accordingly, with the high approval of the authorities at the Buenos Ayres end. My luggage all bore large labels for Mendoza, so that by no chance should it be taken on to Chili while I remained in the Argentine town. In the summer time, the international trains go three times a week, and in the winter time but twice. I had positive assurance that the thrice-a-week service was still running in this first week of May, so that I could spend two days in Mendoza between trains. In the preceding year, the Transandine Railway had been closed for four months, owing to the severity of the winter weather in the mountain passes, and I was anxious that in the event of the winter of 1913 rivalling that of 1912, I should not be among the passengers “held up” in these snowy wilds. I felt I was running it quite closely enough in determining upon a two days’ stay at Mendoza merely to study the town, and when the guard of the train informed me in the course of a casual conversation that only two trains a week were running and I should have to stay four clear days before I picked up the next connection over the Andes, I forthwith determined to continue my journey, especially as I had found such agreeable companions.

But now arose the question of my luggage, which I had so elaborately marked that it might not by any chance be carried beyond Mendoza. I sought out the representative of Villalonga, the Pickford of the Argentine, and explained the situation to him. Looking at my voucher, he remarked that there was no necessity to make any change, as the luggage, according to the voucher, was all consigned through to Santiago! The luggage inspector, with a gang of porters, was employed in shifting the baggage from the transcontinental train to that which had to climb the mountains, and he also assured me that it did not matter in the least where the luggage was labelled for, as it would all go on to Santiago. And I had been at such pains to provide for its unshipment at Mendoza!

I greatly regretted not being able to linger in this fresh and attractive town, which, under the bright dawn of that autumn morning, seemed to be a place where one might have sojourned very pleasantly for a few days. The streets of the new town, built entirely since the disastrous earthquake of 1861, are for the most part wide and in fairly good condition, many of them lined with shady trees and a stream of fresh water running in the gutters. But I was taking no risks in the upper Andes, as I remembered the experiences related to me by certain travellers, a year before, who had been snowbound at Puente del Inca, and reconciled myself to having no more than a glimpse of Mendoza when it was just turning on its pillow and thinking of getting up. (I lived to regret this, as several colleagues joined me in Chili at intervals of months later, and all had good journeys, the Andes remaining “open” all the winter.)

The sun was radiant when, a little after seven, we steamed out of Mendoza station and crept in among the verdant foothills of the Andes, where all around us were signs of vegetation and natural conditions utterly distinct from those of the Atlantic side. There was a bracing touch of cold in the morning air, and yet a feeling that here was the most delightful of climates, with sunny slopes where the grapes ripened in far-spreading vineyards, the sight of which transported one at once to the pleasant land of France, and I can imagine that the many French settlers who have come to Mendoza, attracted by the great and growing wine trade of the town and district, will often have the illusion that they are still at home.

The railway, all the way from Mendoza almost to the Pacific, follows the course of rivers, which at first run eastward from the watershed of the mountain frontier and then westward to the ocean. The scenery is by no means sensational in its beauty, as the train threads its way among the gentler valleys watered by the River Mendoza for some forty or fifty kilometres westward of the city. But as the ascent becomes more precipitous and the clatter of the rack and pinion slackens to the slowest of tunes, while the engine crawls, with much puffing, laboriously upwards, the panorama of the mountain heights grows very beautiful, and unlike most mountain scenery of Europe.

Wild and barren are the hills, and lifeless and dead they seem, for rarely does a bird flit across the scene, and few cattle or sheep find pasturage after we have passed the junction of the Rivers Mendoza and Uspallata, between forty and fifty miles westward of Mendoza. There is a great stillness among these mountains, a feeling of cold and cheerless solitude. Here we are among the waste places of the earth, and yet they lack the Dantesque majesty of rugged grandeur and fantastic outline, having instead a certain rhythmic monotony of form, varied only by their extraordinary and sensational colouring. Great patches of heliotrope and purple, long zigzag streaks of green, immense blotches of yellow—vivid as mustard—bright spots here and there of red and gleaming blue, and large tracts of oily black—such are the colours I recall among these gigantic volcanic masses, where an almost endless variety of mineral substances give these unfamiliar tints to the treeless and grassless heights. Sometimes, indeed, I found that what looked like a great patch of sulphur, on nearer approach proved to be a thin yellow grass, upon which those strange animals, the llamas, are able to feed, and it was, I think, at the station of Zanjon Amarillo, where we had reached a height of some 7,350 feet, that I first saw two or three of these quaint beasts of burden, who stopped cropping this scanty herbage to gaze at the train with their questioning eyes, in which there is always a suggestion of indignation.

These wayside stations, of which there are many on the route, are almost the only signs of habitation, and it is difficult to imagine that anywhere among those forbidding hills human beings are so luckless as to have their homes. Everybody at the station seemed to be shivering with cold, as the bright sunlit sky of the morning was now, in the early afternoon, glooming over with grey, foreboding a snow-storm, and I thought I had never seen anything more charged with melancholy than the little plot of graves beside the station of Zanjon Amarillo. Some dozens of tiny, wooden crosses and withered wreaths decorated this loneliest of cemeteries. I suppose most of them who were sleeping their last sleep alongside this lone little railway station had been employed in the making of the line, for there is surely naught else but the making and maintenance of the railway to inhabit these cheerless wastes.

From time to time, of course, little groups of prospectors are wandering among the mountains, looking for favourable spots where mining may be attempted, but so far that industry in this region is of the slightest. We carried with us in our train a number of young Englishmen employed as sectional superintendents of the line, who had been on a visit to Buenos Ayres, and at various points they were dropped off, with much hand-shaking and good wishes, to begin another spell of lonesome, but, perhaps, not uninteresting work. Their conversation touched the varying merits of certain distances which ought to be allowed between the telegraph posts, and it was surprising to learn how greatly opinions could differ on that subject.

As we approach Punta de las Vacas, a few miles beyond Zanjon Amarillo, the ascent suddenly stiffens, and the railway now performs the characteristic corkscrew journey of all Alpine lines. This station is at the junction of the Cow River (_Rio de las Vacas_) with the Mendoza, but whence the name of the former I cannot guess, for it seemed a region where _vacas_ would fare badly. Southward we had now a view of the volcano Tupungato, but when we had laboriously climbed another twelve or thirteen miles to Puente del Inca, we were just in time to see, away to the north, the summit of Aconcagua, the monarch of the Andes, being blotted out in a snow-storm, which in a few minutes more was upon us, quickly filling the empty barrows about the station with whitest flakes and enticing most of the passengers to engage in the primitive pastime of snow-balling. At this point, 9,000 feet above sea level, where there is quite a good hotel, with thermal baths that attract many visitors in the summer time, we find one of the few curiosities of the route, a natural bridge of volcanic matter, over the stream, but I imagine he was a lonely Inca who gave his name to it, as this is surely the farthest limit to which Inca civilisation reached southward from Peru and Bolivia.

The train now continued its journey through a white world, the Andes had disappeared as if by magic. Snow and white sky everywhere, so that it strained the eyes to look out of the window, and the increasing cold made us don our thickest wraps and muffle up, while the rarefied air began to make breathing somewhat difficult. Along the route it was strange to pass, every little way, an Indian railway labourer, standing at times on the very edge of a precipice that swept downwards into the mysterious white depths beneath, and holding in his hand the spade with which he had been at work on the approach of the train, or perhaps a signal flag with which he had indicated that all was clear at some dangerous corner, but invariably looking entirely resigned to the fate that had cast him thus to labour for the scantiest fare in these upland wastes, where, by the railway side, we passed from time to time the rude huts in which the Indian peones huddled like animals.

I remember that the station at Las Cuevas presented quite a lively scene, a number of railway engineers and officials, wearing their thick ponchos, having come out to the verandas of their wooden houses, which stand back some short distance from the station and are connected therewith by a wooden bridge. I felt that if one had any particular desire to pit himself against the primal forces of nature and the rude red life of savage things, here was the station to get off at, 10,500 feet above sea level, but I was glad to stay in the train and to pull my travelling rugs the closer around me as it panted still upward, and presently entered the famous tunnel which penetrates the summit of the Cordillera Principal, precisely where the frontier line runs between the Argentine and Chili.

When we emerged on the other side and immediately began to descend, we had bid good-bye to Argentina, and one of the strangest and most moving scenes I have ever witnessed presented itself. We came out upon a colossal amphitheatre, from which, to the northwest, the mountain swept down from the Inca’s Lake—seen dimly through the driving sleet and snow on our right—into a white mysterious abyss some two thousand feet below, where dark objects such as the rocky shoulders of lower hills, seemed to be floating in an eerie sea of vapour. The snow storm had lessened and was turning now to rain, but the scene was awesome in its effect upon the observer descending these uncanny slopes into this vague new land.

And in such fashion, at the sleet-veiled threshold of Chili, I, who little more than a year before had set out in search of sunshine, must take leave of my reader.

THE END

FOOTNOTES

[1] British exports to the Argentine in 1912 amounted to $103,555,485, while United States exports totalled $53,158,179.

[2] From the year 1857 to 1912 inclusive 4,248,355 persons of all classes entered the Argentine. The nationalities represented were as follows: Italians, 2,133,508; Spaniards, 1,298,122; French, 206,912; Russians, 136,659; Syrians, 109,234; Austrians, 80,736; Germans, 55,068; Britons, 51,660; Swiss, 31,624; Belgians, 22,186; Portuguese, 21,378; Danes, 7,686; Dutch, 7,120; N. Americans, 5,509; Swedes, 1,702; Others, 79,251. During the year 1912 the total number of newcomers was 323,403, comprising Italians, 165,662; Spaniards, 80,583; Russians, 20,832; Syrians, 19,792; Austrians, 6,545; French, 5,180; Portuguese, 4,959; Germans, 4,337; Britons, 3,134; Danes, 1,316; Swiss, 1,005; N. Americans, 499; Belgians, 405; Dutch, 274; Swedes, 94; Others, 8,786. While the repatriation of hundreds of thousands would reduce these figures greatly, the increase by births in the country, which cannot readily be traced, is an important countervailing item. The Argentine authorities naturally set great store on this, and even state at times the number of “women of child-bearing age” entering the country.