Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/444



414 TRIP TO ASUNCION.

about quaint Cordoba^ the ex-Jesuit Seminary^ one of the oldest of the scattered cities with which the Spaniards had built up a kind of skeleton civilization. In company with Major Ignacio Kickard^ R.A._, we had inspected the Sierra de San Luiz, and visited the scene of the terrible earthquake at Mendoza. We then crossed the Andes by the Uspal- lata Pass, enjoying two views which amply requited us for all our little hardships. We rested at Santiago de Chile, known to you by the fire in the Jesuit church,, which destroyed some 2000 of the fairest of the fair Chilenas. We then embarked at Valparaiso for Peru, and saw what we could of the ports ruined by the last " sea-quake/^ per- haps the most destructive recorded in history, running some risk from the deadly typhus, called yellow fever, but really engendered from the putrefaction of unburied dead, human and bestial. Finally, we returned to the Plata River via Magellan, whose glaciers and contrasts of scenery,

" Where Chili bhifFs and Plata flats the coast,"

— the western half Andine, the eastern Pampasian — were a splendid novelty, a wonder, a delight, that electrified the most jaded of fellow-travellers.

At Buenos Aires, finding myself just too late for the homeward-bound Royal Mail, I embarked on Sunday, April 4, 1869, on board a former acquaintance, the Proveedor. She had, meanwhile, been much improved by the new com- mander. Captain Carboneschi. On this trip the party con- sisted of Messrs. Curtis and Palmer, of the United States, and my old friend, Mr. Charles H. Williams, of Bahia, who, having suffered a four-years^ infliction of newspaper leaders, wished to judge for himself the " crusade in Paraguay.'^ One of the first to greet me on board was my quondam host of San Fernando, D. Leonardo Mendoza, who had accompanied the Allied forces on their up-march to Asun-