The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-07-23
ON TO ASUNGIQA,
CAPITAL OF hRA-
 GUAK.


 and Courier.)
 corrientes, on the Parana, June 27s
 It must be confessed that the long journey up this most wonderful river system in the. world. from the Atlantic to the very heart of South America, grows monotonous at the average rate Of ten krfots an hour. Our destination IS Asuncion. the capital of Paraguay. two thousand miles from the starting point; and as day after day drags la zily by, one day exactly like all the rest, it seems as if the objective point would never be attained
 For days after leaving Rosario we saw nothing but an endless succession of bluffs on. the east, some of them ris- ing as high as one hundred feet, while on the west low banks stretch away in yerdant plains. alternated with luxuri- ant woods. For hundreds of miles there is no Sign of humanity, or any living thing. There are long reaches of peach, apple and other wild fruit trees. Then rows of popIars. straight and tall as chdrch spires. or willows line the bank babbling their long arms in the Waser, and nearly every trunk is en- tNsfned by a brilliant network of con dolvuli, glowing with scarlet and yell low flowers among the green. The up- per Parana has an average width of two miles. but it's channel is so winding that We skirt first one bank. then the other, some times coming so close that one could toss a stone ashore. The riv- CT is full of small islands, some low and marshy, with strange, tall trees upon them; others overgrown with rank grassland green scrub. But the silence and desolation of them all are appall- ing Never any sound or trace of man or beast or bird. till by and by the war whoop of a wild Indian or the howl of "a tiger would be a welcome relief. There are islands entirely covered with skeleton trees. their leaves. bark and branches having been stripped off and destroyed by a carniverous bird called the bigua-a sort of turkey -buzzrad. At long intervals we see a parpincha (amphibious pigl asleep in the ooze, or a solitary vulture-hawk, or a crane Hitting slowly by; while day after day the semi-tropic sun pours his fiercest rays upon the muddy waters that are. unruffied except by the steamers mo- tion
 In speaking of the scarcity of living things, I forgot the insect world, which is very much alive and diabolically en- ergetic- especially the mosquitoes. There is the bete rough, which lays the foundation of a tremendous ulcer Go ashore, into the woods, and in a nso- ment you are covered with ticks. Chi goes bury themselves in your flesh, and hatch large colony of young chigoes in a few minutes. Flies get into your mouth, your eyes. your nose; you eat flies, drink flies breath flies. Spiders, red and yellow; Hazards, cockkroaches, centipedes, scorpions, tarrantuIas, snakes, and a few other ever-present companions creep into bed with you. Ants and crickets eat up the books and letters and clothesand will eat you up, too, if you will stand long enough. Everything devours, bites stings or poi sons after an evil fashion of its own All insect with an odd number of legs (eleyen) is swimming in your teacup; a caterpillar with several dozen eyes set in rows along it's body scampers over your bread and butter; you observe a hairy worm with a round head under a crisp lettuce leaf of your salad, trying to wriggle himself out of the vinegar. Meat, unless toured" past all resem- blance to anything edible, will not keep a day without being sWarmed with an other active form of life and as for the cheese and the bitter-they are quite able to walk off the table by themselves on the second day of exposure. And the rnosquitos! Always numerous in these parts, there are seasons when they come in clouds that literally ob- scure the sun, and the sound of their buzzing is like that of distant saw mill, eight hundred miles above Mon tevideo, still following the windings of this wonderful river system through endless stretches ofspampa, the land on both sides still belongs to the Argentine but Paraguay is not great way ahead. And away up here, hun dreds of miles from nowhere in the remote Interior of an apparently unoc cupied territory, one is astonished to find a crowd of vessels from every country in Europe, anchored in front of Corrientes-f this city, like Rosario, is far below, is a port of entry and en- joys great deal of foreign commerce. We observe that ships from England and Germany are especially numerous, and that there is not one from the Uni ted States, and are told that the foreign trade of these parts is quite monopo- lized by the English and German mer- chants, who have been long established in Corrientes.
 Viewed from the harbor, Corrientes rather impressive-th Moorish tower of it's cabildo in front, f1anked by two massive and ancient churches, half q dozen tall tanneries and leather man. ufactories near the landing and the sloping, rk-brown roofs of the hous- es--a very unusual thing in South America, where nearly all the house. tops are flat and covered with red tiles; and, most singular feature of all, queer-looking column, like a miniature CIeopatra's needle, standing quite by itself mile east of the town, near the river bank Ashore, we discovered that the quaint brown roofs are the trunks of palm trees split longitudinally and laid on so as to have their convex sides