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Updated: June 29, 2025
Many of the silky, fluffy, knitted garments that command the highest prices for winter wear, and which are called by various names, such as "vicuña," "camel's hair," etc., are really made of alpaca. The alpaca, like its cousin, the llama, was probably domesticated by the early Peruvians from the wild guanaco, largest of the camels of the New World.
But, strange to say, the auditory, insensible to the delight with which the public would view the splendid architectural improvements with taste too grovelling to appreciate the glories of plate-glass shop-fronts and brass scroll work too selfish to rejoice, for its own sake, in the beauty of arabesques and chandeliers, which, though they never might behold, the astonished public would with souls too niggardly to leap for joy at the thought that gents would henceforth buy the registered guanaco vest, and the patent elastic omni-seasonum paletot half-a-crown cheaper than ever or that needy noblemen would pay three-pound-ten instead of five pounds for their footmen's liveries received the news, clod-hearted as they were, in sullen silence, and actually, when they got into the street, broke out into murmurs, perhaps into execrations.
Their only garment consists of a mantle made of guanaco skin, with the wool outside: this they wear just thrown over their shoulders, leaving their persons as often exposed as covered. Their skin is of a dirty coppery-red colour. The old man had a fillet of white feathers tied round his head, which partly confined his black, coarse, and entangled hair.
Value of an Estancia. Cattle, how counted. Singular Breed of Oxen. Perforated Pebbles. Shepherd-dogs. Horses broken-in, Gauchos Riding. Character of Inhabitants. Rio Plata. Flocks of Butterflies. Aeronaut Spiders. Phosphorescence of the Sea. Port Desire. Guanaco. Port St. Julian. Geology of Patagonia. Fossil gigantic Animal. Types of Organisation constant. Change in the Zoology of America.
Some of our party afterwards went to the Union Club, where they met several English gentlemen, who were most kind and pressing in their invitations to them to stay a few days longer, and go up the mountains to see the views and to have some guanaco shooting.
But, so far as Elsie was concerned, Boyle's fund of reminiscence had dried up. After the midday meal on Christmas day a sumptuous repast, for the due preparation of which Elsie had come to the Chilean cook's assistance in the matter of the plum-pudding Suarez suddenly reported that a new column of smoke was rising from Guanaco Hill, a crag dominating the eastern side of the bay.
The plain as usual consisted of gravel, mingled with soil resembling chalk in appearance, but very different from it in nature. From the softness of these materials it was worn into many gulleys. There was not a tree, and, excepting the guanaco, which stood on the hilltop a watchful sentinel over its herd, scarcely an animal or a bird. All was stillness and desolation.
But, as a matter of fact, it was we on the plain who were beginning to feel the pinch of hunger. "Peneleo, the Indian chief, sat by our fire folded in his ample mantle of guanaco skins. He was an athletic savage, with an enormous square shock head of hair resembling a straw beehive in shape and size, and with grave, surly, much-lined features.
The plain as usual consisted of gravel, mingled with soil resembling chalk in appearance, but very different from it in nature. From the softness of these materials it was worn into many gulleys. There was not a tree, and, excepting the guanaco, which stood on the hill-top a watchful sentinel over its herd, scarcely an animal or a bird. All was stillness and desolation.
About this time Gomez de Alvarado reduced the province of Guanaco to obedience; and Francis de Chavez subdued the Conchincos, who often vexed the town of Truxillo and its adjoining country, by various inroads.
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