my mind, also some adventures I met with, some with birds and others
with snakes, which will occupy two or three or more chapters later on.




CHAPTER V

ASPECTS OF THE PLAIN

Appearance of a green level land--Cardoon and giant thistles--Villages
of the Vizcacha, a large burrowing rodent--Groves and plantations seen
like islands on the wide level plains--Trees planted by the early
colonists--Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral
people--Houses as part of the landscape--Flesh diet of the gauchos--
Summer change in the aspect of the plain--The water-like mirage--The
giant thistle and a "thistle year"--Fear of fires--An incident at a
fire--The _pampero_, or south-west wind, and the fall of the thistles
--Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals--A great pampero
storm--Big hailstones--Damage caused by hail--Zango, an old horse,
killed--Zango and his master.



As a small boy of six but well able to ride bare-backed at a fast
gallop without falling off, I invite the reader, mounted too, albeit
on nothing but an imaginary animal, to follow me a league or so from
the gate to some spot where the land rises to a couple or three or
four feet above the surrounding level. There, sitting on our horses,
we shall command a wider horizon than even the tallest man would have