In Patagonia Read Free Page B

side is bright purple, the other bright green, with cracked orange mud and a white rim. You have to be a geologist to appreciate it. Then I know of no place that you are aware of prehistoric animals. They sometimes seem more alive than the living. Everybody talks of pleisiosaurus, or ichtyosaurus. I met an old gentleman who was born in Lithuania who found a dinosaur the other day and didn’t think much of it. He thought much more of the fact he had a pilot’s license, at the age of 85 being probably the oldest solo flyer in the world. When he was younger he tried to be a bird man.
    I have been caught in the lost beast fervour and 2 days ago scaled an appalling cliff to the bed of an ancient lake ... and there discovered to my inexpressible delight a collection of fragments of the carapace of the glyptodon. The glyptodon has if anything replaced the mylodon in my affections—there are about 6 whole ones in the Museum La Plata—an enormous armadillo up to 9-10 feet long, each scale of its armour looking like a Japanese chrysanthemum. The entertaining fact about my discovery, and one that no archaeologist will believe, is that in the middle of one scatter of bones were 2 obsidian knives quite definitely man-made. Now Man is often thought to have done away with the Glyptodon, but there is no evidence of his having done so.
    Not an Indian in sight. Sometimes you see a hawkish profile that seems to be a Tehuelche i.e. old Patagonian, but the colonisers did a very thorough job, and this gives the whole land its haunted quality.
    Animal life is not extraordinary, except for the guanaco which I love. The young are called chulengos and have the finest fur, a sort of mangy brown and white. There is a very rare deer called a Huemeul and the Puma (which is commoner than you would think but difficult to see). Otherwise pinchi the small armadillo, hares everywhere, and a most beguiling skunk, very small, black with white stripes; far from spraying me one came and took a crust from my hand.
    Birds are wonderful. Condors in the cordillera, a black and white vulture, a beautiful grey harrier (also amazingly tame), and the black necked swan which has my prize for the best bird in the world. On the mud flats are flamingoes—these are a kind of orange colour—the Patagonian goose inappropriately called an abutarda, and every kind of duck.
    You would think from the fact that the landscape is so uniform and the occupation (sheep-farming) also, that the people would be correspondingly dull. But I have sung “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” in Welsh in a remote chapel on Christmas Day, have eaten lemon curd tartlets with an old Scot (who has never been to Scotland) but has made his own bagpipes and wears the kilt to dinner. I have stayed with a Swiss ex-diva who married a Swedish trucker who lives in the remotest of all Patagonian valleys, decorating her house with murals of the lake of Geneva. I have dined with a man who knew Butch Cassidy and other members of the Black Jack Gang, I have drunk to the memory of Ludwig of Bavaria with a German whose house and style of life belongs rather to the world of the Brothers Grimm. I have discussed the poetics of Mandelstam with a Ukrainian doctor missing both legs. I have seen Charlie Milward’s estancia and lodged with the peons drinking mate till 3am. ( Maté incidentally is a drink for which I also have a love/hate relationship). I have visited a poet-hermit who lived according to Thoreau and the Georgics. I have listened to the wild outpourings of the Patagonian archaeologist, who claims the existence of a. the Patagonian unicorn b. a protohominid in Tierra del Fuego ( Fuego pithicus patensis ) 80 cm high.
    There is a fantastic amount of stuff for a book—from the Anarchist (Yes, Bakunin inspired) Rebellion of 1920, to the hunting of the Black Jack Gang, Cassidy etc., the temporary kingdom of Patagonia, the lost city of the Caesars, the travels of Musters, the