Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

103 страница из 108

The thousand-year-old erosion of the swift stream had cut a deep gash, two or three leagues wide in certain places, in the Patagonian table land. The river slid along through this cut between two banks of earth brought down by the stream in the flood season. These banks were of a rich and light soil, extremely fertile wherever the river water reached it. But beyond this point the ground rose to form steep, yellow, sinuous walls that gazed unblinkingly at one another across the gliding black water; and beyond these heights stretched the mesa, that region where icy cold alternates with suffocating heat, where hurricanes torment the harsh vegetation that will yield a living only to those flocks that can scour many leagues of that arid plain.

All the life of the region was concentrated in the wide fissure carved by the river waters across the desert. The two strips of soil on its banks represented so many thousand miles of fertile earth brought down by the river from its wanderings in the Andes. And it was in one part of this great cleft that the government engineers were at work in an attempt to raise the level of the waters the few yards necessary in order to inundate the adjoining lands.