In Calling
Up Images Of The Past, I Find That The Plains Of Patagonia
Frequently Cross Before My Eyes; Yet These Plains Are Pronounced
By All Wretched And Useless.
They can be described
only by negative characters; without habitations, without
water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely
a few dwarf plants.
Why, then, and the case is not peculiar
to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on
my memory? Why have not the still more level, the greener
and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind,
produced an equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these
feelings: but it must be partly owing to the free scope given
to the imagination. The plains of Patagonia are boundless,
for they are scarcely passable, and hence unknown: they
bear the stamp of having lasted, as they are now, for ages,
and there appears no limit to their duration through future
time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was
surrounded by an impassable breadth of water, or by deserts
heated to an intolerable excess, who would not look at these
last boundaries to man's knowledge with deep but ill-defined
sensations?
Lastly, of natural scenery, the views from lofty mountains,
through certainly in one sense not beautiful, are very
memorable. When looking down from the highest crest of the
Cordillera, the mind, undisturbed by minute details, was
filled with the stupendous dimensions of the surrounding masses.
Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to
create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of
a barbarian - of man in his lowest and most savage state.
One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks,
could our progenitors have been men like these?
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