Patagonia impresses the traveller as vast and elemental. Its natural configuration is stamped with these characteristics. From its northern boundary it tapers gradually to the Straits of Magellan. The Argentine section naturally divides itself into three divisions, running north and south. Along the Atlantic shores lie the pampas, the flat and level plains. These plains rise in gently graduated terraces toward the west, one level plain above another. Then follows a network of lagoons and lakes, some connected by rivers and others by channels, many of which shift and alter under the climatic influences. On the western side the Andes range of the Cordilleras stand out against the sky like a mighty barrier. They are a tumult of mountains ever climbing upwards, their lofty gorges choked with glaciers, their hollows holding great lakes of ice-cold blue waters, and about their bases stretch thousands of miles of forests of which only the mere edge has been explored. Thus it is that the vast extent of Patagonia offers the most extreme and the most abrupt contrasts. Flat pampa, with hardly an undulation in sight, stands in sight of mountains almost inaccessible in their steep escarpments. Side by side these contrasts lie, mountain against plain, forest against thorn-scrub. The wind is the only element common to both. For a thousand miles the Atlantic coast is a low-lying, level, treeless series of bleak and brown downs, with few bays that offer protection to shipping; the Pacific coast, in Chile, is dented and notched with fiords, and the shores are covered with dense forests due to the excessive rainfall. Patagonia is a land of big distances. On the Atlantic coastland it is often a ride of three or four days from one farm to another. The holdings are measured by the square league and not by the quarter-section. There is one farm that covers five hundred square leagues, or more than two million acres of land, and is larger than the state of Rhode Island. No wonder the distances seem almost appalling to the traveller. One accustomed only to cities would indeed feel very forlorn here. As one travels into the interior, a white face becomes more and more rare; empty leagues upon leagues surround you on every side. One seems to stand alone with only the wind, the mirages and the limitless distances, and the blue sky above for a canopy. This wild land appears, according to geologists, to have been the last habitation of the greater beasts of preceding ages. It is now one of the last to be occupied by civilized man, and receive its proper share of the human population.