Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/452



422 TRIP TO ASUNCION.

Again a gap in the eastern bank shows the mouth of the ArroyOj or Estero Pikysyry.* It drains the northern Laguna Ypoa (lucky water) — the Laguna Ypao of Mr. Mans- field — and it falls into the Paraguay river just below the first or southern battery of Angostura. Unfordable^ and some sixty feet broad, it completely defended these works from the south, and connected them with the Loma Valentina. The important and strongly-fortified tren- cheira, or line of the Pikysyry, is 9104 metres in length, with 142 gun-platforms, not including those on the river side, thirty-three magazines, and thirty-four drains under the parapet. Lowlands flank the stream, and the Paraguayans had, according to custom, thrown over its mouth two reprezas or dykes — not three, as has been stated — and had thus raised to nearly five feet the waters overlying the swamps to the south and east. On the north-east of the Pikysyry is the rising ground communicating with the Loma Valentina, and a little north of the dykes was a redoubt, which the Paraguayans were too hard worked to finish building. When the main force of the Allies crossed over to the Gran Chaco, they here left, in front of the Paraguay lines which they intended to turn, the Argentines, the Orientals, and the Brazilian brigade of 1500 men. The defenders of the lines may have amounted to 4000 — not, as has been reported, to 7000 and 9000.

The end of a long march brought us to the celebrated Angostura, or " narrowing â– " (of the river). Here the atream shrinks to 600 yards ; there is a strong current, more like a rapid, in the great bend to the east, and the channel is full of remansos, or dead water. I was told by an Eng-

and so forth. Lt.-Col. Thompson translates it " Shrimp-stream," from piky, a shrimp : and syry, a stream. May it not he the " water of the Pequi shrub ?" I have alluded to this tree in " The Highlands of the Brazil."
 * The word is written in various ways : Pequisiry, Piquisari, Pykjciry,