Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/224



194 UP THE URUGUAY RIVER, AND

mountain â€” M. Michelet answers for the latter, I for the former â€” has his or her distinct physiognomy. Let us com- pare masculine Uruguay with the Parana, which, at least be- tween the Paraguay junction and the Delta, is palpably and distinctly feminine. The former is raw-boned with rock- rib, muscular with rolling green '^ loma^"*â€” swelling ground and hillock â€” which shall presently become hill and moun- tain ; sinewy with high sandstone banks, rough-skinned with white grit, and hirsute with thin willow, giant grasses, and grand forest growth. The latter, Parana, is of the " long and lazy " order of feminine loveliness ; a kind of sleepy Venus like a certain Dudu; a broad-bosomed daughter of Amphitrite reposing in the softest of osier beds ; a placid smiling Princess, who has never heard of revolution, or of kings and queens retired from business.

Geographically and politically, Uruguay is Brazilian, fed by the copious rains of the " Empire of the Southern Cross " therefore is he tolerably sweet and wholesome, not to say clear and clean â€” at any rate the dirt is clean dirt. Parana, three-quarters rain to one-quarter snow, contains dirty dirt, salts washed from the saleratus deserts, and the mineralized soils of the lower Andes : in parts therefore the waters are not drunk. Both are equally pesculent, both are barless, both will supply timber-rafts more valuable than any on the Rhine, both average in flood two and a half knots per hour, and both have water power enough to give an engineer dynamical dreams. In both, as the slope flattens the curves become sharper, or what is equiva- lent, the greater the volume of water, the straighter- are the reaches. But the accurate observation of instruments must determine this question, and here I stop, otherwise Messrs. Fergusson and Tremenheere, who have lately done deadly battle in the Journal of the R. G. Society, will deal with me as did the rival editors with a certain old friend^ â€”