“Tell me truly, Richard, what have you heard?” she asked.
I forced a smile, and, taking her hand, assured her that I had heard nothing to cause her any uneasiness. “Come,” I said, “let us go in and prepare to leave town tomorrow. We will go back to the point we started from—your father’s estancia, for the sooner this meeting you are thinking about so anxiously is over the better will it be for all of us.”
Appendix
History of the Banda Orientál
The country, called in this work the Purple Land, was discovered by Magellan in the year 1500, and he called the hill, or mountain, which gives its name to the capital, Monte Vidi. He described it as a hat-shaped mountain; and it is probable that, four centuries ago, the tall, conical hat, which is worn to this day by women in South Wales, was a common form in Spain and Portugal.
In due time settlements were made; but the colonists of those days loved gold and adventure above everything, and, finding neither in the Banda, they little esteemed it. For two centuries it was neglected by its white possessors, while the cattle they had imported continued to multiply, and, returning to a feral life, overran the country in amazing numbers.
The heroic period in South American history then passed away. El Dorado, the Spaniard’s New Jerusalem, has changed into a bank of malarious mist and a cloud of mosquitoes, Amazons, giants, pygmies,
“The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders,”
when closely looked for, turned out to be Red Indians of a type which varied but little throughout the entire vast continent. Wanderers from the Old World grew weary of seeking the tropics only to sink into flowery graves. They turned away sick at heart from the great desolation where the splendid empire of the Children of the Sun had so lately flourished. The accumulated treasures had been squandered. The cruel crusades of the Paulists against the Jesuit missions had ceased for the inhuman slave-hunters had utterly destroyed the smiling gardens in the wilderness. A remnant of the escaped converts had gone back to a wild life in the woods, and the Fathers, who had done their Master’s work so well, drifted away to mingle in other scenes or die of broken hearts. Then, in the sober eighteenth century, when the disillusion was complete, Spain woke up to the fact that in the temperate part of the continent, shared by her with Portugal, she possessed a new bright little Spain worth cultivating. About the same time, Portugal discovered that the acquisition of this pretty country, with its lovely Lusitanian climate, would nicely round off her vast possessions on the south side. Forthwith these two great colonising powers fell to fighting over the Banda, where there were no temples of beaten gold, or mythical races of men, or fountains of everlasting youth. The quarrel might have continued to the end of time, so languidly was it conducted by both parties, had not great events come to swallow up the little ones.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the English invasion burst like a sudden terrible thunderstorm on the country. Montevideo on the east and Buenos Aires on the west side of the sea-like river were captured and lost again. The storm was soon over, but it had the effect of precipitating the revolution of 1810, which presently ended in the loss to Spain of all her American possessions. These changes brought only fresh wars and calamities to the long-suffering Banda. The ancient feud between Spain and Portugal descended to the new Brazilian Empire and the new Argentine Confederation, and these claimants contended for the country until 1828, when they finally agreed to let it govern itself in its own fashion. After thus acquiring its independence, the little Belgium of the New World cast off its pretty but hated appellation of Cisplatina and resumed its old joyous name of Banda Orientál. With light hearts the people then proceeded to divide themselves into two political parties—Whites and Reds. Endless struggles for mastery ensued, in which the Argentines and Brazilians, forgetting their solemn compact, were forever taking sides. But of these wars of crows and pies it would be idle to say more, since, after going on for three-quarters of a century, they are not wholly ended yet. The rambles and adventures described in the book take us back to the late ’sixties or early ’seventies of the last century, when the country was still in the condition in which it had remained since the colonial days, when the ten years’ siege of Montevideo was not yet a remote event, and many of the people one met had had a part in it.
Colophon
The Purple Land
was published in 1885 by
W. H. Hudson.
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The cover page is adapted from
Rest Under Rocks,
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