One morning I visited the Victoria Wool Market, long rows of well-built sheds, where not only wool but cereals and general camp produce are sold. I doubt if anywhere there is a similar market quite so large, for it has a floor area of 484,000 square feet and a storage capacity of 50,000 tons. Close by are the deposits to receive the Mendoza wines, which will have a profitable European sale when once the supply grows beyond the Argentine demand. Then there are deposits for the storage of alfalfa. The spread of development was revealed by the remarks which came in reply to my inquiries. "Oh, that was built last year"; "This was erected a couple of years ago, but we are going to make extensions"; "Five years ago we thought this place big enough, but we are going to pull it down and put up something ten times the size." Here was commercial progress expanding monthly. Here was a town which had been little more to me than a name on the South American coast before I visited it--and I consider myself a travelled man--and when I saw its energy and its growth I wondered how much the great industrial populations of crowded Europe knew of what was taking place so many thousands of miles across the sea.
[Illustration: THE ELEVATORS AT INGENIERO WHITE.]
The success of Bahia Blanca lies in the back country known as the pampa. I journeyed across it in a trip from Mendoza to Bahia Blanca, and, as the name denotes, it is a vast featureless plain. Most of it is naturally fertile, but even regions that are sandy will be productive in the growing of alfalfa, which seems specially suitable, and which will not only maintain herds of cattle, but is profitable as a feeding stuff to be exported. As yet the pampa has been little more than scratched. From the railway cars the idea is obtained that the whole of the country is converted to the use of man. Ten or twenty miles beyond the line you reach desert--desert so far as use is concerned, though the illimitable expanse of waving grass tells the tale of future possibilities. Wherever the railways stretch their arms there is cultivation, for the ever spreading population follows quickly on the laying down of the rails.
I have heard people talk about the monotony of the pampa. But this territory has a special fascination of its own. There is a bigness, an immensity, an unendingness which lays hold of the imagination. The great silence, save for the play of the wind amongst the long grass, seizes the fancy. Sunrise and sunset come and go in a wonderful glory. At the birth of day all the grass sparkles with dew; the softest colours seem to brush the world. When the sun is up, and blazes from a sky with all the blue burnt out of it, a sort of oppressive hot hush rests upon the world. The long grass seems to drowse beneath the pitiless glare. You can travel for hundreds of miles and never see a hillock or a tree or a beast, or hear a bird. But into this land man is slowly but persistently penetrating. To folk who live at home the life seems deadening. Yet men come to love it, not passionately but clingingly, so that many a man who has "made his pile" and returned home to spend it in ease begins to crave for the pampa, and he is not content until he visits it again.