An air of peace gave a strange interest to this little corner of a world plunged into strife and woe. The herders nodded on their horses, who for their part hung down their heads, and now and then shifted their quarters so as to bring their heads into the shade. The innkeeper, Garcia, in his town clothes, and perched upon a tall grey horse, to use his own words, “sweated blood and water like our Lord” in the fierce glare of the ascending sun. Suarez and Paralelo pushed the ends of the red silk handkerchiefs they wore tied loosely round their necks, with two points like the wings of a great butterfly hanging upon their shoulders, under their hats, and smoked innumerable cigarettes, the frontiersman’s specific against heat or cold. Of all the little company only the Pampa Indian showed no sign of being incommoded by the heat. When horses strayed he galloped up to turn them, now striking at the passing butterflies with his heavy-handled whip, or, letting himself fall down from the saddle almost to the ground, drew his brown finger on the dust for a few yards, and with a wriggle like a snake got back into his saddle with a yell. The hours passed slowly, till at last the horses, having filled themselves with grass, stopped eating and looked towards the river, so we allowed them slowly to stream along towards a shallow inlet on the beach. There they stood drinking greedily, up to their knees, until at last three or four of the outermost began to swim. Only their heads appeared above the water, and occasionally their backs emerging just as a porpoise comes to the surface in a tideway, gave them an amphibious air, that linked them somehow or another with the classics in that unclassic land. Long did they swim and play, and then, coming out into the shallow water, drink again, stamping their feet and swishing their long tails, rise up and strike at one another with their feet. As I sat on my horse upon a little knoll, coiling my lazo, which had got uncoiled by catching in a bush, I heard a voice in the soft, drawling accents of the inhabitants of Corrientes, say, “Pucha, Pingos.” {27} Turning, I saw the speaker, a Gaucho of about thirty years of age, dressed all in black in the old style of thirty years ago. His silver knife, two feet or more in length, stuck in his sash, stuck out on both sides of his body like a lateen. Where he had come from I had no idea, for he appeared to have risen from the scrub behind me. “Yes,” he said, “Puta, Pingos,” giving the phrase in the more classic, if more unregenerate style, “how well they look, just like the garden in the plaza at Fray Bentos in the sun.”