Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/282



252 FROM ROZARIO TO CORRIENTES.

^' pronouncement " was carried out in the most orthodox and approved modern fashion.

A little above the monastery is the spot where, in 1527, Cabot built the Antigo Fortin del Espirito Santo (Sancti Spiritus), which was thus senior to Asuncion and Buenos Aires. It was abandoned when the great explorer returned to Europe, and the Tapiales or mud walls must long ago have melted away. We read in Wilcocke and older writers the pathetic tale of Lucia Miranda and Sebastian Hurtado : how Mangora, Cacique of the Timbuez (Timbu tribe), at- tacked for love of her Fort Holy Ghost, and how his brother Siripo, equally bewitched, burnt her alive in a wild fit of jealousy, and caused her husband to be shot to death with arrows. Buenos Aires has also its romantic tale, of which one Maldonata was the heroine : she had made her- self useful to a lioness, and the grateful beast supported her during a terrible famine, and saved her life from the savagery.

Beyond the Antigo Fortin lay that of Corpus Christi, built by Ayolas, to control the Timbii " Indians'"' of the Car- carana or Rio Tercero, a western influent of the Parana. Here the river settles into its normal aspect. One shore is a barranca or tall bank, which now appears to the east, and sometimes clean disappears : the other shore is a low, grassy, and often-flooded point. The wavy outline of the barranca is scattered with copse and trees, and spread with a carpet of gramma, plisse as it were, and often divided into two webs ; one green, smooth, and low ; the other yellow and long-piled. Its height is sometimes eighty feet, and the profile is a perpendicular silt-scarp, cut as if with a knife above, sloping below, and fissured laterally in all directions by rain and rivulet. This regularity of outline we shall trace far up into the Paraguay, and by it we shall presently explain the one unvarying style of Paraguayan defence, and the similar monotony of the Allied attack.