It then appeared they had started back to the coast
accompanied by a bevy of Indian damsels, thirty-five in all.
They were followed and brought back, and then explained
that they were on their way to Spain to complain against the Governor.
The five-and-thirty dusky catechumens remained without an explanation,
and the people were once more `scandalized'. The Governor then started out
against the Guaycurus. Only those who know the Chaco,
or western bank of the river Paraguay, can form the least idea of what
such an expedition must have been. Even to-day in the Chaco
the change since the beginning of the world can be but slight.
As a steamer slips along the bank, nothing for miles and miles is seen
but swamp, intersected with backwaters,*1* in which lie alligators,
electric eels, and stinging rays. Far as the eye can reach
are swamps, swamps, and more swamps, a sea of waving pampa-grass.
After the swamps thickets of tacuaras (canes), forests of thorny trees,
chanares, nandubay, jacarandas, urundey, talas, and quebrachos,
each one hard enough to split an axe, some, like the black canela,
almost like iron; the inhabitants ferocious and intractable as when
the Governor himself first saw them; the climate heavy and humid, the air dank
with vinchucas*2* and mosquitoes and the little black infernal midget
called the jejen; no roads, no paths, no landmarks, but here and there
at intervals of many leagues a clearing in the forest
where some straggling settlement exists, more rarely still
the walls of a deserted Jesuit mission-house or church. Ostriches and deer,
tigers,*3* capibaras and tapirs, and now and then a herd of cattle
as wild as buffaloes, are seen. Sometimes an Indian with his lance
sits motionless upon his horse to watch the vessel pass --
a sentinel to guard the wilderness from encroachments from without.
So Alvar Nunez, as he tells us in his Commentaries, started with
four hundred men and with one thousand friendly Indians,