On the 11th we hit civilisation after a march of over forty miles, the last part of which lay across a _travesia_. Civilisation took the form of an undersized drinking-shop perched on the rim of the bare pampa. How we had longed for civilisation--and now we had found it! I sat writing in a room with pink fly-blown walls and green fittings of the grimiest. Four Gauchos of the lower sort were playing cards for beans and shrieking over their game. The little innkeeper, a small, dark, aquiline, black-bearded Argentine, in a dirty white vest and a black neck-rag, held rule inside. Any camp is better than these antennæ of civilisation, that seem to have touched and always to bear onwards with them things unclean and repulsive. Jones' homely face was good to see, when he came in and said, "I should like to be away from here."
I realised suddenly how I loved the camp and the cold clean hills, when I heard the raucous music of that unlovely place. It was scarcely a pleasure to see cognac advertisements again, and to smell the dregs of yesterday yet awash on the greasy grey metal counter! A concertina was playing the old aching tunes that always seem to carry with them tags of vice and crime.
We pushed on for Santa Cruz, and on the way passed the house of another trader, who also sold liquor. It squatted beside the river, which here flowed blue and estuary-like between white-faced cliffs backed by bald hills. A board over the door of the shop bore the legend "_La Gaviota_," or Seagull. It was evidently part of the wreckage of some boat washed up on these beaches.
Santa Cruz town is situated on the banks of a large estuary formed by the junction of the rivers Santa Cruz and the Southern Chico before they fall into the Atlantic. It is a straggling place, a collection of wooden houses with roofs of corrugated iron. The chief export is wool, which in the season lies in long rows of bales upon the shore ready to be embarked. The town lies beyond sandhills, which separate it from the sea. Concertinas and jack-boots ring in its galvanised-iron huts; mules, horses, dogs, and cattle house in its formless _plazas_. It is a place which you hate and like at one and the same time. You long to get away from it while you are there, yet find yourself looking back sometimes and wishing to see again its vague streets and its drag-net agglomeration of humanity.