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"Look," he exclaimed, pointing to a low ridge that stood out blackly in the moonlight. Behind the low eminence Frank could distinctly see a head cautiously moving about, seemingly reconnoitering the two ships. In a few seconds it vanished as the apparent spy retreated behind the ridge. "That must have been a Patagonian," said Frank.
But to this generalisation there are three great exceptions. In the case of countries that are not European at all, and have never had our civic conceptions, or the old Latin scholarship. I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for "citizenship" at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak's word for "the Republic" has been familiar to me from the nursery.
Among the Patagonian Indians in the Strait of Magellan, we found a half Indian, who had lived some years with the tribe, but had been born in the northern provinces. I asked him if he had ever heard of the Avestruz Petise. He answered by saying, "Why, there are none others in these southern countries."
Occasionally some scoffer who thinks he is smart and does not know that he is mistaken asks with an air of a Socrates putting his last question: "You say that 'heaven is above us. But if one dies at noon and another at midnight, one goes toward Orion and the other toward Hercules; or an Eskimo goes toward Polaris and a Patagonian toward the coal-black hole in the sky near the south pole.
Who is it? well may be asked. What name is it that blanches with terror the cheeks of the Patagonian navy? Who but the Pirate Prodigy the relentless Boy Scourer of Patagonian seas? Voyagers slowly drifting by the Silurian beach, coasters along the Devonian shore, still shudder at the name of Bromley Chitterlings the Boy Avenger, late of Hartford, Connecticut.
Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.
"I can't reach you; as if one of us spoke Patagonian. Hellish, it seems to me." He turned and disappeared, as violently as he had come, over the obscurity of the lawn. A reddish, misshapen moon hung low in the sky, and gave the aging man an extraordinarily vivid impression of dead planets, unthinkable wastes of time, illimitable systems and spaces.
The ptarmigan in Chilkoot Pass discards his winter white feathers for brown; the Patagonian Beau Brummell oils his chignon and clubs him another sweetheart to drag to his skull-strewn flat. And down in Chrystie Street Mr. "Tiger" McQuirk arose with a feeling of disquiet that he did not understand.
We hear most frequently of North America, New Zealand, and Australia in this connection; but nowhere on the globe has civilization "written strange defeatures" more markedly than on that great area of level country called by English writers the pampas, but by the Spanish more appropriately La Pampa from the Quichua word signifying open space or country since it forms in most part one continuous plain, extending on its eastern border from the river Parana, in latitude 32 degrees, to the Patagonian formation on the river Colorado, and comprising about two hundred thousand square miles of humid, grassy country.
Besides the Patagonian rivers, the Rio Colorado and the Rio Negro, flow into the sea along deserted solitudes, uninhabited and uninhabitable; while, on the contrary, the principal rivers of Australia the Murray, the Yarrow, the Torrens, the Darling all connected with each other, throw themselves into the ocean by well-frequented routes, and their mouths are ports of great activity.
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