Rozario Is A Large
Town Built On A Dead Level Plain, Which Forms A Cliff About
Sixty Feet High Over The Parana.
The river here is very
broad, with many islands, which are low and wooded, as is
also the opposite shore.
The view would resemble that of a
great lake, if it were not for the linear-shaped islets, which
alone give the idea of running water. The cliffs are the most
picturesque part; sometimes they are absolutely perpendicular,
and of a red colour; at other times in large broken
masses, covered with cacti and mimosa-trees. The real
grandeur, however, of an immense river like this, is derived
from reflecting how important a means of communication
and commerce it forms between one nation and another; to
what a distance it travels, and from how vast a territory
it drains the great body of fresh water which flows past
your feet.
For many leagues north and south of San Nicolas and
Rozario, the country is really level. Scarcely anything which
travellers have written about its extreme flatness, can be
considered as exaggeration. Yet I could never find a spot
where, by slowly turning round, objects were not seen at
greater distances in some directions than in others; and
this manifestly proves inequality in the plain. At sea, a
person's eye being six feet above the surface of the water,
his horizon is two miles and four-fifths distant. In like
manner, the more level the plain, the more nearly does the
horizon approach within these narrow limits; and this, in
my opinion, entirely destroys that grandeur which one would
have imagined that a vast level plain would have possessed.
October 1st. - We started by moonlight and arrived at the
Rio Tercero by sunrise. The river is also called the Saladillo,
and it deserves the name, for the water is brackish.
I stayed here the greater part of the day, searching for fossil
bones. Besides a perfect tooth of the Toxodon, and many
scattered bones, I found two immense skeletons near each
other, projecting in bold relief from the perpendicular cliff
of the Parana. They were, however, so completely decayed,
that I could only bring away small fragments of one of the
great molar teeth; but these are sufficient to show that the
remains belonged to a Mastodon, probably to the same species
with that, which formerly must have inhabited the Cordillera
in Upper Peru in such great numbers. The men
who took me in the canoe, said they had long known of these
skeletons, and had often wondered how they had got there:
the necessity of a theory being felt, they came to the
conclusion that, like the bizcacha, the mastodon was formerly
a burrowing animal! In the evening we rode another stage,
and crossed the Monge, another brackish stream, bearing the
dregs of the washings of the Pampas.
October 2nd. - We passed through Corunda, which, from
the luxuriance of its gardens, was one of the prettiest
villages I saw.
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