At length we got her off into the little shallow bay, where the waves were breaking, for a wind was rising out of the north-west.
During the day Cattle and I went down and viewed the Leona. We fixed upon a little backwater some distance down stream, where wood was abundant, as the goal of our first venture. The river had swollen and was rising, and the current looked menacing, but we thought that with great care and slow movement we might bring the launch through all right. Care and slow movement! We did not foresee to what an extent the elements were destined to take charge of our affairs.
Our plan was to descend the river stern-first with only enough steam to enable the boat to answer her tiller; for fuel we had no choice but to burn wood, and although califate made no bad firing, still the results to be expected were not by any means the same as if we had been able to put coal into the furnace.
In the evening the horses strayed, and I went to bring them in. The landscape on this side of Viedma is the most desolate imaginable, being made up chiefly of sand, sparse yellow grass, low thorn-bushes, and the skeletons of dead game. It is a place only fit to die in, a fact the guanacos seem to have grasped, for their bones lay all over the ground in far greater profusion even than upon the shores of Lake Buenos Aires. The mountains about Viedma differ in outline from most of the other ranges in Patagonia. The peaks are more pointed and rise against the cold sky in a line of pinnacles and minarets.
My way led me along the banks of the Leona. It was a grey and miserable afternoon verging towards evening, and the strong wind was sending a large volume of water racing and moaning between the bare and treeless banks of the river. I remember thinking with great longing of warm and comfortable England, of good friends and true, of home, and of all the many small things which make life worth having. I suppose every one is attacked with this kind of feeling sometimes. Not very often, luckily, nor when the sun is shining, but on these miserable, grey, whimpering evenings everything takes on a sombre shade.
I found the horses collected in a _rincon_, beneath the shelter of a few thorn-bushes; they were looking very forlorn, especially the Alazan, who was etched out darkly against the bleak sky. They seemed a bit tucked up too after the tiring marches of the previous days.