Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/131



MONTE VIDEO. 101

suvius. The top is a new lighthouse, represented by a per- pendicular knob, and a red nipple rising from the straight walls of an old fort, and giving at a distance an imposing semblance to what is called by picnickers " the Mountain/' We shall presently end with the systematic series of mis- nomers which begins in the Brazil. The " Orientals '^ are not Easterns. The Argentines are, if aught of silver, German silver. The Plate River has nothing Platine, and for Buenos Aires the local Joe Miller reads Malos Aires. The Cerro is no more a mountain than is " Roseberry Top- ping," the " highest hill in all Yorkshire. '^

The rocks of the Cerro, like the rest of the Banda, are mostly volcanic and secondary ; thus the country boasts to excel her rival in the phosphates and alkaline silicates which develop meat and corn. Turning to the left of the dwarf pier men have found columnar basalt, the last sign of igneous action so strikingly displayed in the grand Brazilian Man- tiqueira. Amongst the granites, gneisses, and sandstones are scatters of quartz which still give gold ; and the rusty waters trickling down the hillside, and clothing it with grass and blossoms, red, white, and blue, betray the presence of iron.

From the summit, looking east, you have a bird's-eye view of the city, which, set after a fashion upon a hill, cannot be hid. The site is a boot-shaped ridge, admirable for drainage, and everywhere commanding a broad view. This hog's back of stone forms, on the eastern part of the bay, a peninsula about one mile and a quarter long from south- west to north-east, with half a mile of average breadth. The regular outline of the narrow chine is broken by the towers of the Matriz and of the Vascos and Cordon churches. As New York is bounded by the East and Hudson rivers, so Monte Video has water on both sides, here the bay, there the sea-like stream, which you can hardly call river, a Yang- tse-kiang, a yellow flood, a muddy Mediterranean. Eor-