River in Paraguay Leads Only To Mystery

1903

A GREAT MYSTERY

A Land From Which No Traveler Has Returned

One of the great mysteries of the world that is left for explorers to solve is the course of a river in South America and the land through which it runs.

The river is the Pilcomayo, and the land is the territory known as the Chaco in Paraguay. Explorer after explorer has entered this unknown country and none has returned. Last year the famous explorer, Erland Nordenskiold, one of the great Nordenskiold family of explorers and naturalists, tried to follow the Pilcomayo to its source, but, although he penetrated further than any other man ever managed to go and return, he did not succeed.

Enemies who could not be seen surrounded him day and night, and at last the mysterious terrors of the region forced even him to return. He has announced that Chaco still waits for the traveler who can conquer its secrets. So constant and unchangeable has been the doom of the explorers who tried it that the natives have named the Pilcomayo the River of Death and they speak of the Chaco as the Unknown Land.

Geographers know where the Pilcomayo river begins. It is in the high plateau of Bolivia. Near Asuncion in Paraguay, a broad and beautiful river empties into the Paraguay river. It is called the Pilcomayo, and it is supposed that it is that river. But no man knows for no man has followed the great stream from its source to its mouth.

Men have tried to follow the Pilcomayo in canoes that were hung with hides to serve as protection against Indians who occupy the Chaco. But after days of fighting they were beaten back and accounted themselves lucky to escape alive. Some of the best men of South America have lost their lives there, and of their parties not one man escaped to tell what fate had befallen them.

Fiercest of the several tribes of Indians who hold Chaco against exploration are the Tobias and Chorotes Indians. They are utterly uncivilized, subsisting entirely on game, fish, wild honey and roots. Their few garments and shelters are made from jaguar skins. They rub pieces of wood together to make fire.

Most of them are gorgeously painted and tattooed and they ornament themselves still further with feathers and flowers.

They do not know anything about metal working and do not even use flints for their weapons, but make them entirely out of hard wood, even their arrows being made simply out of pointed wood.

They bore holes through their lips and ears and thrust a piece of polished wood through them. They are splendidly formed, immensely strong and agile, but hideous in countenance; and they will not have anything to do with strangers, but seek to kill them as soon as they find them. They fight fiercely among themselves, also, and it is believed that they are cannibals — at least part of them.

This is the county that has lured explorer after explorer in the last twenty years without letting one return. It appears probably that it will continue to defy the world for many years to come. — Ex.