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Updated: June 23, 2025
In regard to these fierce animals, M. Forgues says that enough of them are to be met with in the forests of Paraguay to affright the bravest man, but it is more difficult to avoid them than to see them. They are sometimes caught in traps resembling enormous rat-traps and baited with raw meat.
From the boat M. Forgues fires at these, and a little later he tries his skill on a jaguar, which, however, with a fierce growl, scampers off, and is lost to sight in the mazes of the high grass beyond. These localities and Villa Oliva, which is next passed, are all on the left bank, the opposite side of the river being peopled only by the wandering Indians of Gran Chaco.
During his sojourn in Villa Rica, M. Forgues purchases a house there, to the great gratification of the community, who, in the simplicity of their hearts, see in him the pioneer of European immigration, the influential capitalist who is to introduce foreign money among them. Attentions are showered on him.
The owner of this farm, Mequelain, a French pioneer, his wife and three servants, had been surprised and murdered by the Chaco Indians a short while before the arrival of M. Forgues in Asuncion. The quinta is on the edge of a vast plain. The unfortunate Mequelain had surrounded his house with ditches and a small fence of posts.
In strange contrast with the humble aspect of the houses is the heavy silver pitcher, weighing at least two pounds, from which M. Forgues is given to drink by the owner of one of the huts of whom he has asked water. Leaving these cheerful forest-homes behind him, our traveler fords the Tebicuari-mi, which rises in the cordillera where are gathered the yerba-leaves from which is made the maté.
Margarita is a poor widow with a beautiful daughter. She is a cousin of a former president of the republic, but so destitute did M. Forgues find her that she and her daughter led an existence bordering on starvation. As in the case of his entertainment at the dwelling of Don Matias, he fortunately brings his breakfast with him.
One day to return to our traveler and his personal experiences M. Forgues makes the acquaintance of a Swiss who resides at Paraguari, a small interior town distant about twenty-five leagues from Asuncion.
M. Forgues goes to sleep to dream of a snake for a bedfellow, and to be bitten by mosquitoes of a peculiarly virulent kind through the cords of his hammock. At early dawn our traveler is up and his toilet is made. Before the door silently file the women of the colony on their way to the bank of the river.
Apropos of the religious fervor of the Paraguayan women, M. Forgues relates that there is not a single house in Paraguay occupied by natives which does not possess its two penates in the shape of wooden images of a saint, which are kept enclosed in a glass box and are the objects of incessant devotion.
It is to this land, almost remote enough from the pathway of our modern civilization to partake of the mystery of an unknown interior; where Nature has lavished her beauties with open hand; where a brilliant vegetation alternates with noble forests, solitudes that have rarely echoed the footfall of civilized man, and vast plains dotted with palms a country of mountainous reaches in which the jaguar roams at will, of great lagoons, the home of a primitive race dwelling for the most part in villages, to this land it is that we shall follow M. Forgues on his journey of more than a thousand miles, and see with his eyes its life and scenery.
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