Sometimes it has happened that an animal would have been overlooked or
passed by with scant notice, to be forgotten, perhaps, but for some
singular action or habit which has instantly given it a strange
importance, and made its possession desirable.
I was once engaged in the arduous and monotonous task of driving a large
number of sheep a distance of two hundred and fifty miles, in
excessively hot weather, when sheep prefer standing still to travelling.
Five or six gauchos were with me, and we were on the southern pampas of
Buenos Ayres, near to a long precipitous stony sierra which rose to a
height of five or six hundred feet above the plain. Who that has
travelled for eighteen days on a dead level in a broiling sun can resist
a hill? That sierra was more sublime to us than Conon-dagua, than
Illimani.
Leaving the sheep, I rode to it with three of the men; aad after
securing our horses on the lower slope, we began our laborious ascent.
Now the gaucho when taken from his horse, on which he lives like a kind
of parasite, is a very slow-moving creature, and I soon left my friends
far behind. Coming to a place where ferns and flowering herbage grew
thick, I began to hear all about me sounds of a character utterly unlike
any natural sound I was acquainted with--innumerable low clear voices
tinkling or pealing like minute sweet-toned, resonant bells--for the
sounds were purely metallic and perfectly bell-like.
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