Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/466



436 ASUNCION,

only the flies bred by the horses and the meat, whilst the chorus of drunken voices and the twanging of guitars tell all the low debauchery of a camp. We pass on, humming " She was a harlot, and I was a thief," to the new Custom- house opposite — a strip of whitewashed building conspicuous from the river, and therefore showing sign of shot. The long western face is arched, but not with "Moorish arches," as a late traveller says ; and the depth being built up a slope which has not been levelled, gives to the arcade a peculiarly crooked and tumble-down aspect.

The landing-place is deep and slushy, with loose reddish sand contrasting well with the greenery, and with water in almost equal proportions. Here begin the tramway and telegraph posts, running eastward, and passing a casemated, stone-revetted battery of ten guns, which commands the landing-place and the river. It concludes the system of defence, and you would find it hard to explain how such miserable works put to flight a squadron of Brazilian iron- clads. The tramway runs up the Calle de Asuncion, alias de la Iglesia, the chief street near the river. As the road has been graded down, many houses are perched upon tall detached blocks of stiff" red clay and incipient sandstone. The formation of the Asuncion hill is of grit and pudding- stone, often covered with a cape of iron ; the rock is evidently ferriferous, and the metal occurs pure in pyriform grains. The surface is a sand composed of fragmentary quartz, milky and coloured pale -red by oxide: the pieces are all more or less polished, and water, often chalybeate, bursts through the covering. The streets of Asuncion are the streets of Buenos Aires, only these are on a flat, and those are on a slope ; moreover, the latter usually lack side-paths. Where they lead to the river the thorough- fares are deeply gashed by rain, and in some places water stained with oxide gushes from the ground, making them mere