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Soon they were treading the grassy slopes of the first ridges of the Sierra Tandil, and an hour afterward the village appeared in the depths of a narrow gorge, and above it towered the lofty battlements of Fort Independence. THE Sierra Tandil rises a thousand feet above the level of the sea. It is a primordial chain that is to say, anterior to all organic and metamorphic creation.
It was a useless precaution, however; for that same evening, they camped for the night in an immense TOLDERIA, which they not only found perfectly empty, but which the Patagonian declared, after he had examined it all round, must have been uninhabited for a long time. Next day, the first ESTANCIAS of the Sierra Tandil came in sight.
It is formed of a semi-circular ridge of gneiss hills, covered with fine short grass. The district of Tandil, to which it has given its name, includes all the south of the Province of Buenos Ayres, and terminates in a river which conveys north all the RIOS that take their rise on its slopes.
Glenarvan might, perhaps, have got some information at these houses, but it was the surest plan to go straight on to the village of Tandil. Accordingly they went on without stopping, fording the RIO of Los Huasos and also the Chapaleofu, a few miles further on.
These we shall pass by, and cross over the Sierra Tandil, pursuing our search to the very shores of the Atlantic, as far as Point Medano." Paganel went through this programme of the expedition without so much as a glance at the map.
The details given by the Sergeant, the nationality of the prisoner, the murder of his companions, his escape from the hands of the Indians, all evidenced the fact. Glenarvan looked at Thalcave with a crestfallen face, and the Indian, turning to the Sergeant, asked whether he had never heard of three English captives. "Never," replied Manuel. "They would have known of them at Tandil, I am sure.
"Is Fort Independence far away?" asked Glenarvan. "No, it is in the Sierra Tandil, a distance of about sixty miles." "And when shall we arrive?" "The day after to-morrow, in the evening." Glenarvan was considerably disconcerted by this circumstance.
It appears from M. Parchappe's observations, that at Tandil there is a range of quartzose gneiss, very like the rocks of the S. Larga near Maldonado, running in the same N.N.E. and S.S.W. direction; so that the framework of the country here is very similar to that on the northern shore of the Plata. Geolog. page 46.
Glenarvan felt that, cost what it might, they must not lose his track, and therefore decided to follow the advice of Thalcave, and go to the village of Tandil. They would find some one there to speak to, at all events. About four o'clock in the evening a hill, which seemed a mountain in so flat a country, was sighted in the distance.
Here the Argentine territory resumed its monotonous aspect. A few clumps of trees, planted by European hands, might chance to be visible among the pasturage, but quite as rarely as in Tandil and Tapalquem Sierras. The native trees are only found on the edge of long prairies and about Cape Corrientes. Next day, though still fifteen miles distant, the proximity of the ocean was sensibly felt.
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