Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/185



A DAir AT BUENOS AIRES. 155

swept up like the silt of the Nile by the storm- wind from the arid sub-Andine wastes to the south-west.

Actual Bueuos Aires will soon see a better future when its water-front shall be built up like Californian San Fran- cisco or the levees of New Orleans. Somebody will find her brickj and w ill, Augustus-like^ leave her marble. Evidently, present amelioration is loudly called for. The barques and brigs, brigantines and polaccos, schooners and luggers in port now generally average upwards of 200, and soon they will be 500. The injury to merchandize is enormous ; therefore every engineer proposes his nostrum, and naturally enough the authorities, stunned by so much counsel, are deaf to the voice of specific. Similarly the owner of the Great Dragon TreeatTenerifife â€” you remember â€” over-advised by the host of travellers, allowed it one fine day to fall. The foreigner accuses the native of being a dog in the manger, which perhaps the native is; whilst assuredly the foreigner is mostly anxious about the bone purely for the boners sake.

The difficulties in the way of constructing a port are certainly enormous. The characteristic feature of the south-eastern or Buenos Airean shore is deep water in lines and patches â€” the Outer and Inner Roads, the Pozo, the Catalinas, and others. These are broken and divided by long narrow banks and shallows, incipient islands, whose length is of course disposed down stream. From the mouth of the Corpus Christi, also called the Lujan River â€” the nearest stream independent of the Parana delta â€” a fringing shelf of mud and soft stone, the '^ Residencia bank," so called from an old Hospital, subtends the land. The ^^tosca," in places twenty feet thick and thinning off to three, is a whitish-yellow skin, an upright and raised crust standing out from the mud, like tables of lava. In places it is hard, in others it is so soft that the boring-iron slips