[Footnote: The
Women Are Not Provided With Even The Barest Necessities Of Life.
Here
they are landed and, perforce, fasten themselves like leeches on the
licentious soldiery.
I speak from personal knowledge, for I have
visited the "hell" of Paraguay.] Between these forts and Bolivia, on
the west, I have been privileged to visit eight different tribes of
Indians, all of them alike degraded and sunken in the extreme; savage
and wild as man, though originally made in the image of God, can be.
The Chaco is a great unknown land. The north, described by Mr.
Minchin, Bolivian Government Explorer, as "a barren zone - an almost
uninterrupted extent of low, thorny scrub, with great scarcity of
water," and the centre and south, as I have seen in exploring
journeys, great plains covered with millions of palm trees, through
which the astonished traveller can ride for weeks without seeing any
limit. In the dry season the land is baked by the intense heat of the
tropical sun, and cracked into deep fissures. In the rainy season it
is an endless marsh - a veritable dead man's land. During a 200-mile
ride, 180 lay through water with the sun almost vertical. All this
country in past ages must have been the bed of a great salt sea.
As I have said, the Chaco is peculiarly Indian territory, into which
the white man steps at his peril. I accepted a commission, however,
to examine and report on certain parts of it, so I left the civilized
haunts of men and set foot on the forbidden ground.
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