The wide palm plains are almost uninhabited; I have journeyed eighty miles without sighting human being or wigwam. In the rainy season the trees stand out of a sea-like expanse of steaming water, and one may wade through this for twenty miles without finding a dry place for bivouac. Ant hills, ten and fifteen feet high, with dome-shaped roofs, dot the wild waste like pigmy houses, and sometimes they are the only dry land found to rest on. The horses flounder through the mire, or sink up to the belly in slime, while clouds of flies make the life of man and beast a living death. Keys rust in the pocket, and boots mildew in a day. At other seasons, as I know by painful experience, the hard-baked ground is cracked up into fissures, and not a drop of water is to be found in a three days' journey. The miserable savages either sit in utter dejection on logs of wood or tree roots, viewing the watery expanse, or roam the country in search of _yingmin_ (water). Whereas the Caingwas may be described as inoffensive Indians, the inhabitants of the Chaco are _savages_, hostile to the white man, who only here and there, with their permission, has settled on the river bank. Generally a people of fine physique and iron constitution, free from disease of any kind, they are swept into eternity in an incredibly short space of time if _civilized_ diseases are introduced. Even the milder ones, such as measles, decimate a whole tribe; and I have known communities swept away as autumn leaves in a strong breeze with the _grippe_. I was informed that the hospital authorities at Asuncion gave them the cast-off fever clothing of their patients during an epidemic to sweep them off the face of the earth! The Indians have been ill-treated from the beginning. Darwin relates that, in their eagerness to exterminate the red men, the Argentine troops have pursued them for three days without food. On the frontier they are killed in hundreds; by submitting to the white man they die in thousands. Latin civilization is more terrible to them than war. Sad to state, their only hope is to fight, and this the savage affirms he will do for ever and ever.