“All the forces of nature had been brought to bear upon this mountain giant. Visible signs lay around one of the power of the weather and rapid changes of temperature to destroy. Aconcagua, with all its cherished secrets and its mystery, lay here before one, confessing itself as nothing more than a colossal ruin, for not a single vestige of the ancient crater of this extinct volcano remains. Foot by foot the relentless forces of nature have reduced the mountain to its present proportions. The innumerable traces of ruin and decay around one, the crumbling rocks and the disappearance of the crater told of an Aconcagua of the past, whose gigantic base filled the glacier-beds around, whose sides rose towering to the heavens several thousand feet higher than the Aconcagua of to-day; of an Aconcagua of ages yet unborn, split, broken and powdered by frost and heat, pouring itself over valleys and plains in sediment and shingle, a mere shapeless mass whose height will no longer distress the mountaineer. “I looked at the time. It was twenty minutes past six. The sun, a great ball of blood-red fire in a cloudless sky, was dipping into the waters of the Pacific. Rapidly it sank and disappeared from view, yet, as if struggling for supremacy with the fast-approaching night, an afterglow of surpassing beauty spread over land and sea in a series of magnificent changes of colour. The mighty expanse of water from north to south, together with the sky above it, was diffused with a fiery, red glow. While the red in the sky remained, the waters, through a variety of intermediate shades of colouring, turned slowly to purple and then to blue. And yet we were not in darkness, for with the sun’s departure the risen moon declared itself with wondrous brightness, penetrating the thin atmosphere and flooding everything with its colder light.” CHAPTER IX THE PEOPLE AND THEIR CHARACTERISTICS Argentina is made up of a complex population. An Argentinian is a person born in the country, just as we class our own population. Perhaps nearly one-half of the inhabitants are foreign born, and most of them from the Latin countries. A large proportion of the remainder do not have to go back more than one or two generations until a European ancestor is discovered. The Latin races soon become mixed and cannot very easily be traced after a generation or two. The English and German settlers continue distinct and apart. They always remain foreign. The English traits in those who have lived there a generation or two are almost as marked as in those who have recently come over from the tight little island. The later Spanish and Italian immigrants are the workers and do most of the common labour. Wherever newer methods have been introduced the influences are distinctly English. The railways are all owned and operated by the English, and these have given the British touch to all the later developments.