Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/461



LETTER XXIV.

DESCRIBING ASUNCION, EX-CAPITAL OF PARAGUAY.

Asuncion, April 15, 1869.

My dear Z ,

You will patiently endure a somewhat detailed description of the ex-capital of " Prester John's Country in the South." Unique in this world of Hanseatic cities^ it is one of the most characteristic^ and, allow me the word_, idiomatic of towns : a glance reads its history, and yet the plumitifs who called it the "most go-ahead city on the continent/' seem to have missed the peculiarities of its physiognomy.

It is old for these lands, being founded on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin (August 15, 1536). Ayolas, its Romulus, had evidently a nice eye for sites. The Paraguay river, here 800 to 1000 yards broad, sags to the eastward, forming a bay or port of still, dead surface, like a little lake, and the bight is land-locked by a natural breakwater, a long green islet upon which cattle graze. Ships anchor in perfect safety along the shore, and extend in lines high up stream. Their presence adds not a little to the beauty and amenity of the scenery, which has all the softness and grace, without the monotony, of the fair, insipid shores about Humaita.

It is comparatively defenceless : even the half-river stockade shown in the maps of 1857 had been allowed to disappear. True, the invader must run the gauntlet of the Tacumbu ten-gun battery, which lies below a palm-tasselled hill, and separated by a neat glacis from the tall, red sand-