Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/423



TO THE TEBICUARY RIVER. 393

" Capinchos/' we are assured by the South American Pilot (p. 194), "are about the size of our pigs, and their flesh is of fair taste, but they are reported as being un- healthy/' Captain Page (p. 93) found the carpincha's savoury odour very tempting, and seems to have enjoyed it. In this subtropical climate the boatmen eat the hydro- chserus, of course when young. These porcines live upon vegetable substances, and here represent the hippopotamus. They are larger than in the Brazil; I have seen one old hog weighing 130, and I heard of J^OO lbs. ; the male may average 100, and the female 90 lbs. My 10/. householder on board the Arno told me that he had shot capinchos as big as cows. Irritated by an expression of dissent, he as- sured us that it was his project to establish a graseria for extracting the fat of the said water-hog; he might as well have talked of building a boiling-house for grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains.

This excess of imagination supports a theory which long ago I had worked out upon the North American prairies. The Pampa plains, immense and limitless, those mysterious sea-like horizons of the solid land, stimulate the fancy like the unknown, and cause her to express herself in glowing language and exaggerated ideas. Such is the inspiration of the Argentine poet. On the other hand, the paucity of objects upon which the eye of sense can rest, the grand monotony of general, and the dwarfing of animal nature — here seals take the place of whales — compel the brain or mind to seek a stimulus within itself. " How bridle the imagi- natioDs,"' says President Sarmiento (Life in the Argen- tine Republic) " of those who inhabit an illimitable plain, bordered by a river whose opposite bank cannot be seen V Hence, in the prairies, we read of a man riding a hundred miles to accoucher of a lie. We find upon the Pampas the same phenomenon in an exaggerated form. The glo-