R. B. Cunninghame Graham

“ 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. ”

“ Hijinio Rojas, who had saddled up to put the Correntinos on the right road, emerged into the moonlit plaza, his shadow outlined so sharply on the grass it seemed it had been drawn, and then, entering a side street, disappeared into the night. The shrill neighing of his horse appeared as if it bade farewell to its companions, now far away upon the Itapua trail. Noises that rise at night from forests in the tropics sound mysteriously, deep in the woods. It seemed as if a population silent by day was active and on foot, and from the underwood a thick white mist arose, shrouding the sleeping town. ”

“ Blessed are those who rise, to them the world is pleasant and well ordered, all things are right, and virtue is rewarded (in themselves) ; thrice blessed are the pachydermatous of heart, the deaf of soul, the invertebrate, insensible, the unimaginative; nothing can injure, nothing wound them; nature’s injustice, man’s ineptitude, fortune’s black joking, leaves them as untouched as a blind cart-horse, who, in struggling up a hill, sets his sharp, calkered foot upon a mouse. ”

“ Yet I still think if rightly sought the city will be found, and I feel sure the Mescaleros passed the night not far from it, and perhaps looking down upon San Luis Potosi cursed it, after the fashion that the animals may curse mankind for its injustice to them.
Tired of its squares, its long dark streets, its hum of people; and possessed perhaps with that nostalgia of the desert which comes so soon to all who once have felt its charm when cooped in bricks, we set our faces northward about an hour before the day, passed through the gates and rolled into the plains. ”

“ Only a mule, an Iceland pony, or a horse bred in the mountain districts of Morocco could have coped with such a road, and, as it was, the efforts of the poor brutes were pitiable to see. Under our feet, at a great depth below, the Wad el N’fiss boiled furiously amongst the stones, winding and rewinding like a watch spring, and forcing us to cross it many times, when its swift current proved so formidable that, although not more than three feet deep, we had to enter altogether in a group to keep our feet. ”

“ As often happens in South America just before sundown, the wind dropped to a dead calm, and passing little clouds of locusts, feeling the night approach, dropped into the long grass just as a flying-fish drops into the waves, with a harsh whirring of their gauzy wings.
The horses smelt the water at the bottom of the hill, and the whole five hundred broke into a gallop, manes flying, tails raised high, and we, feeling somehow the gallop was the last, raced madly by their side until within a hundred yards or so of the great lake. ”

“ Nestling into the gorges of the hills, and crowning eminences, were scattered villages of the true Atlas type, built all of mud, flat roofed, the houses rising one over the other like a succession of terraces or little castles, and being of so exactly the same shade as the denuded hills on which they stand as to be almost impossible to make out till you are right upon them. At times so like is village to hill, and hill to village, that I have taken an outstanding mound of earth to be a house, and many times have almost passed the village, not seeing it was there. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Eustaquio Medina, who knew the district as a sailor knows the seas where he was born, rode in the front of us. As his horse shied at a shadow on the grass or at the bones of some dead animal, he swung his whip round ceaselessly, until the moonlight playing on the silver-mounted stock seemed to transform it to an aureole that flickered about his head. Now and then somebody dismounted to tighten up his girth, his horse twisting and turning round uneasily the while, and, when he raised his foot towards the stirrup, starting off with a bound. ”

“ All can read and write, can keep accounts, as well as if they had been born in Hamburg; most have ophthalmia, some are good-looking, pale with great black eyes, and every one of them seems to be fashioned with an extra joint about the back. Yet hospitable, civil and a link with Europe, which they have never seen; but about which they read, and whose affairs they follow with the keenest interest, all knowing Gladstone’s name and that of Salisbury; all longing for the day when they can put on European clothes and blossom out arrayed after the gorgeous fashion of the tribe in Mogador. ”

“ At mid-day, when the sun was at its height, when locusts, whirring through the air, sank in the dust as flying-fish sink in the waves, when palm-trees seem to nod their heads, and lizards are abroad drinking the heat and basking in the rays, when the dry air shimmers, and sparks appear to dance before the traveller’s eye, and a thin, reddish dust lies on the leaves, on clothes of men, and upon every hair of horses’ coats, he reached a spring. ”

“ The tents lay in the moonlight like gigantic mushrooms; the rows of bottles cut in blue cloth with which the Arabs ornament them stood out upon the canvas as if in high relief. The first light dew was falling, frosting the canvas as a piece of ice condenses air upon a glass. In a long line before the tents stood the pack animals munching their corn placed on a cloth upon the ground.
A dark-grey horse, still with his saddle on for fear of the night air, was tied near to the door of the chief tent, well in his owner’s eye. ”

“ Even to-day the incursions of the fierce Zimouri, a Berber tribe, render a visit at times precarious. The walls of the town enclose a space of about a mile circumference; sheep, goats, and camels feed inside them, and a footpath leads from one deserted gate-house to the other, a shepherd boy or two play on their reeds, and though the sun beats fiercely on the open space, it looks forlorn and melancholy, and even the green lizards peering from the walls look about timidly, as if they feared to see a ghost. ”

“ Only at Cadiz can the talisman be seen, shining low down on the horizon, and still waiting till the precession of the equinoxes takes it across the Straits. Let it recross, and shine upon the old wild life of the vast plains, upon the horsemen flying on the sands, whirling and circling like gulls, whilst the veiled women raise the joyous cry which pierces ears and soul; upon the solemn stately men who sit and look at nothing all a summer’s day, and above all upon the waveless inland sea men call the Sahara. ”

“ Beyond the town appeared the mountains peeping out shyly through the smoke, as if they looked down on the follies of mankind with a contemptuous air.
Dead bodies strewed the streets, in attitudes half tragical, half ludicrous, some looking like mere bundles of old clothes, and some distorted with a stiff arm still pointing to the sky.
Right in the middle of a little square the friar lay shot through the forehead, his sword beside him, and with the flag clasped tightly to his breast. ”