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Updated: May 19, 2025
Greater than ever is the gloom in their looks as they behold the sterile tract, which should have shown snow-white, all black and forbidding. For the salitral, as all the rest of the campo, is covered with a stratum of mud, and the travesia across it has been altogether obliterated.
In short, a sterile, treeless expanse, or "travesia" for such there are in the Chaco not barren because of infertility in the soil, but from the want of water to fertilise it. Withal, it is inundated at certain periods of the year by the river's overflow, but in the dry season parched by the rays of a tropical sun.
But when established they take little delight in its occupation. Now more than ever are they doubtful and dejected; thinking of that terrible travesia, of which all traces are lost, and none may be found beyond. To Cypriano no night since their starting out seemed so long as this.
It still lacks an hour of sunset, when these begin to show over the brown waste, and from this the trackers know they are nearing the end of the travesia. Cheered by the sight, they spur their horses to increased speed, and are soon on the edge of the salitral; beyond, seeing a plain where the herbage is green, as though no dust-storm had flown over it.
They have made something more than ten miles from the point where they entered upon the salitral; and Gaspar begins to look inquiringly ahead, in the hope of sighting a tree, ridge, rock, or other land-mark to tell where the travesia terminates. His attention thus occupied, he for awhile forgets what has hitherto been engaging it the position of the sun.
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