Viscount James Bryce Bryce

“ Approaching the Argentine shore, one sees a few masts and many funnels rising above the tall hulls of steamships, docked in lines alongside huge wharves. Beyond the open space of the wharf runs a row of offices and warehouses, but nothing else is seen, nor can one tell, except from the size of the docks and the crowd of vessels, that a great city lies behind. Nothing can be seen, because Buenos Aires stands only some thirty feet above high-water mark in a perfectly flat alluvial plain, with scarcely any rise in the ground for hundreds of miles, and not a rock anywhere. ”

“ It is a cheerful country, with scenery constructed, so to speak, on a small scale, as befits a small republic. Broad uplands of waving grass, with here and there tree clumps, and in the centre and north of the country bosky glens winding through rocky hills, make the landscape always pleasing and sometimes romantic. There are no great forests, no deserts, no volcanoes, nothing half so grand as the peaks of the Argentine Andes, but nothing half so monotonous as the flats of the Argentine Pampa. ”

“ I have seen many wild islands in many stormy seas, and some of them more bare and forbidding than this, but never any inhabited spot that seemed so entirely desolate and solitary and featureless. There was nothing for the eye to dwell upon, no lake, no river, no mountain,—only scattered and shapeless hills,—a land without form or expression, yet with a certain simple and primitive beauty in the colours of the yellow grass and grey-blue rocks, shining through clear air, with the sea-wind singing over them. ”

“ The bay of Megillones, guarded by a lofty promontory on the south, and commanding a view of ridge after ridge of mountains stretching out to the north, has a beautiful sweep, and is enlivened by the abundance of seals and sea-lions, who wallow and bark to one another in the long, slow rollers of the Pacific. The beach is excellent for bathing, but the water so cold that only in the hotter part of the year do the Englishmen, who manage the railway and its machine works and who retain here the national love of salt water, find it suitable for anything more than a plunge in and out again. ”

“ The view looking back over the city lying in its green oasis, with a stony desert all round, is superb. As we climb higher, the mass of Ampato and other giants of the western Cordillera deep with snow, rise in the northwest, while westward one sees beyond the reddish grey mountains through which we had mounted to Arequipa from the desert Pampa, the gleaming sands of that desert, and behind them again, just on the horizon, the long, low bank of clouds that covers the Coast Range. ”

“ We step out, and have before us a view, the like of which we had never seen before. In front, looking eastward, was a wide plain of sand and pebbles with loose piles and shattered ridges of black rock rising here and there from its surface, all shimmering in the sunlight. Beyond the plain, thirty miles away, is a long line of red and grey mountains, their sides all bare, their crags pierced by deep, dark gorges, so that they seem full of shadows. ”

“ To the south the bare peaks of Desolation Island, beginning from Cape Pilar, rose with terrific boldness, unscaleable shafts and towers of rock that recalled the shapes of the Coolin hills in Skye or the still loftier summits of the Lofoten Isles in Norway. To the north a mysterious fringe of islands and foam-girt reefs, grey and dim among their mists, hid the entrance to Smyth's Channel and the labyrinth of almost unexplored sounds and inlets along the Chilean coast beyond. ”

“ Rattling rapidly down the incline, past junctions whence branch lines climb to mines high among the hills, we came at last to Calama, the first Chilean village, where rivulets drawn from the Loa make an oasis of bright green corn and alfalfa and support a few shrubs that gladden the wilderness. Evening is always the pleasantest time in the tropics, and it is most so in a desert, when, instead of the hard afternoon glare, gentle lights begin to fall upon rocks and earth and make their dryness luminous. ”

“ To get the thrills of such a ride in their brimming fulness one must take it in the pale moonlight, passing into and out of the shadow of black crags as one spins along the ringing lines of steel.
As it is here that I bid farewell to the Andes, this is a fitting place for some observations on their scenery, as compared with that of the mountain systems more familiar to most of us, such as the Alps and the Caucasus, and the Himalayas, in the Old World; the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada in the New. ”

“ The impressions of a passing traveller are of no value, but it seemed to me, in noting the faces and deportment of the Indians whom we saw, that while both races had less intelligence and rather less look of personal dignity than the Indians of Mexico, the Aymarás seemed both a more dogged and a less cheerful race than the Quichuas. We might, perhaps, expect to find little buoyancy of spirit in those to whom Nature turns on this wind-swept roof of the world so stern a countenance. Yet the Icelander, whose far-distant isle is surrounded by a melancholy ocean, is of a lively and cheerful temper. ”

“ Neither, except in a few upland valleys, is there any verdure of grassy slopes. Green, the softest and most tender of hues, is almost wholly absent from the great ranges and the plateau. On the eastern side of the Andes there is, indeed, vegetation enough and to spare, but once plunged into the forest all distant views are lost, for it is everywhere so thick that neither it nor the mountains above can be seen at all. Except when cresting a ridge, the traveller swelters under an unbroken roof of impenetrable foliage. ”

“ With her temperate climate and her fertile soil, Uruguay is an attractive country. In no part of South America, except perhaps southern Chile, would a European feel more disposed to settle down for life. The people are of pure European stock and have many of the qualities—frankness and energy, courage, and a high sense of honour—which make for political progress. The country is no doubt comparatively small, and it is the fashion nowadays to worship bigness and disparage small nations. ”

“ If man's hand takes something away from the wild charm of nature, he also by degrees creates that other charm which belongs to rural life, so this land will come in time to be less dull and more homelike. Pleasure grounds round the estancias will mitigate the roughness of a first settlement, and there will be groves with dim recesses in their thickets to stir the imagination of children. There is always in the Pampas an amplitude of air and a solemn splendour of the sunset glow to carry the mind away beyond its near surroundings. ”

“ Fifty miles inland, as the crow flies, but much farther by railway, is Santiago, the capital of Chile, and in population the fourth city in South America.51 Except Rio de Janeiro, no capital in the world has a more striking position. Standing in the great central valley of Chile, it looks out on one side over a fertile plain to the wooded slopes of the Coast Range, and on the other looks up to the gigantic chain of the Cordillera, rising nineteen thousand feet above it, furrowed by deep glens into which glaciers pour down, with snowy wastes behind. ”

“ In regions like Scotland or the Alps or Norway one has historical associations and the sense of a long human past to enhance the loveliness of hills and groves and streams. Here one has the compensating charm of an untouched and almost unexplored nature. The traveller in southern Chile feels as if he were a discoverer, so little visited is this land, and such a promise of wild beauty waiting to be revealed lies in the recesses of these mountains. ”

“ In a Spanish, as in an Italian, city, one usually enquires first for the Square, for whatever nobleness a place has is sure to be there. The Plaza de Armas at Lima has much dignity in its ample space, and beauty in its fine proportions, in its central fountain, in the palms and flowering trees and statues which adorn it, besides a wealth of historic associations in the buildings that stand around it. ”

“ Perhaps, also, this charm of southern Chile with its soft, green pastures and shaggy woods and flashing streams was enhanced to us by contrast with the dreary deserts of Peru and Bolivia, through which we had lately passed. Whoever has in his boyhood learnt to love the scenery of a temperate country never finds full satisfaction in that of the tropics, with all their glow of light and all their exuberance of vegetation. ”

“ From Cuzco, the oldest of South American cities, with its mingled memories of an Indian and a Spanish past, I will ask the reader to follow me to a land of ancient silence where an aboriginal people, under the pressure of a stern nature, and almost untouched by all that modern civilization has brought, still lead the lives and cling to the beliefs that their ancestors led and held many centuries ago. This is the heart of the Andean plateau, where, in a country almost as purely Indian as it was when it submitted to Pizarro, lies Lake Titicaca. ”

“ That a city so ancient and famous should not have more of the past to shew, that the aspect of streets and buildings should not be more stately, that there should be so little of that flavour of romance which charms one in Spanish cities like Seville or Avila—these things might be expected in a centre of industry or commerce, losing its antique charm, like Nürnberg or Venice, under the coarsening touch of material prosperity. But there is here no growth of industry or commerce. ”

“ But the wind rose steadily, and next morning the spray was dashing over the vessel when we caught sight, through drifting clouds, of the shores of the Falkland Isles. They were wild and dreary shores bordered by rocky islands and scattered reefs, no dwellings anywhere visible on land, nor any boats on sea. In the afternoon, having passed, without seeing it, the mouth of the channel which separates the East from the West Falkland, we anchored in the deep bay which forms the outer harbour of Port Stanley, the chief harbour and village of the islands. ”

“ In front are the ocean steamers and the tall spars of Australian clippers; nearer shore the smaller craft are tossing on the ocean swell; the upper town is seen rising on its cliffs behind the lower, with high pastures and rocky hummocks still further back. Far away in the northeast the snowy mass of Aconcagua, loftiest of all American summits, floats like a white cloud on the horizon. ”

“ All day long we had watched the white clouds rise and gather, and swathe the great peaks and rest in the glacier hollows between them, and seem to dissolve or move away, leaving some top clear for a moment, and then settle down again, just as one sees the vapours that rise from the Lombard plain form into clouds that float round and enwrap Monte Rosa during the heats of a summer day. ”

“ When South Americans began to be rich enough to travel to Europe and enjoy themselves there, Paris became the Mecca of these pilgrims of pleasure. Many a wealthy Argentine landowner, many a Brazilian coffee planter, every dictator of a Caribbean republic who, like Guzman Blanco of Venezuela, has drawn from the public revenues funds to invest in European securities, goes to the metropolis of fashion and amusement to spend his fortune there. All the young literary men, all the young artists who can afford the journey, flock thither. ”

“ And just beneath, on the opposite side of the hill from these traces of the vanished colonial empire of Spain, the long mole that is to shield the mouth of the Canal is rising, and the steamships lying along the wharves, and cars standing beside them on the railway tracks, presage a commerce vaster than ever was seen in the great days of Spain, for they speak of the passage of men from all the nations along the new waterway through these forests and out over this sea to the ends of the earth. ”

“ Strolling along to the great Botafogo Esplanade under the palms, I found a battery of field artillery, their guns pointed at the two battleships, the Minas and the São Paulo, against which they would, of course, have been as useless as paper pellets. There the majestic yellow grey monsters lay, fresh from Messrs. Armstrong's yard at Newcastle, flying the ensign of Brazil, but also flying at the fore the red flag of rebellion. So the day wore on, terror abating, but the sense of helplessness increasing. ”

“ At Santiago, as at Innsbruck, one sees the vista of a long, straight street closed by towering mountains that crown it with white as the sea crowns with blue the streets of Venice. But here the mountains217 are more than twice as high as those of the Tyrolean city and they never put off their snowy vesture. Wherever one walks or drives through the city in the beautiful public park and on the large open grounds of the race-course, these fields of ice are always before the eye, whether wreathed with cloud or glittering against an ardent sky. ”

“ If Latin America has not yet produced any thinker or poet or artist even of the second rank, this will not surprise anyone who knows what was her condition before the War of Independence and what it has been from that time till recent years. Could any one of those ancient sages whom Dante heard in Limbo, speaking with voices sweet and soft, have been brought back to earth and permitted to survey Europe as it was in the welter of the tenth century, such an one might have thought that art and letters, as well as freedom and order, had forever vanished from the earth. ”