Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/190



160 A DAY AT BUENOS AIRES.

We enter by the Calle Cangallo, here pronounced Cajje Cangajjo_, " oppidum seu pagus de Rio de la Plata '^ â€” still the title of the Archbishopric. A steep short pitch leads to the longitudinal Calle 25 de Maio, the summit of the true " barranca/^ glacis, or old river bank, which is everywhere traceable between the Tigre and the Riachuelo. It has a similar talus, but of greater slope inland, which is rather puzzling to drainage, and though formerly set down at 70 feet, nowhere does its height exceed 64*2 feet above the water ; some reckon 50 feet, but the mean of the barometer is 29-66.

The streets are long, narrow, and ill ventilated ; and the tramway of modern progress is as yet unknown to them. The pavement, even after Monte Video, strikes us as truly detes- table. It is like a fiumara-bed, bestrewn with accidentally disposed boulders, gapped with dreadful chasms and man- holes, bounded on both sides by the trottoirs, narrow ledges of flattish stone, like natural rock " benches,^^ flood- levelled on each side of the torrent. In many parts the side walks are raised three and even five feet above the modern street plane, and flush with the doors, which are high up as that of the Kaabah. These trottoirs covered, like the pavement after rain, with a viscid mud, sliding as a ship^s deck, dangerous as a freshly waxed parquet for the noble savage, often end at the corners with three or four rude steps, rounded slabs, greasy and slippery by the tread, as though spread with orange peel, and ascended and de- scended with the aid of an open-mouthed carronade, or a filthy post blacked by the hand of toil. There is a legend of a naval captain who cracked his pate by a header down one of these laderas, these corniches, these precipices, and certainly few places can be more perilous than they are for gentlemen in the state decently termed " convivial.^' Like the trottoirs they want handrails.