In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 1

The area is most effectively defined by its soil. You know you are in Patagonia when you see rodados patagonicos, the basalt pebbles left behind by glaciers, and jarilla, the low bush that is its dominant flora. 107

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 2

Patagonia’s nothingness forces the mind in on itself. 111

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 3

Ted Turner and Sylvester Stallone have bought properties there.132

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Question 4

Chatwin was particularly adept at extracting from perfect strangers their best stories and making extravagant connections. 151

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 5

marvelous and limitless backdrop against which to play out his thesis. A theater for his own restlessness, Patagonia, he would covertly argue, was the source of everyone else’s restlessness too. 232

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Question 6

(Maté incidentally is a drink for which I also have a love/hate relationship). 279

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Question 7

Bridges observed: “If you haven’t ruffled any feathers, you certainly haven’t written anything worth writing.” 324

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Question 8

the Welsh community of Gaiman, 328

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Question 9

Chatwin’s book, she often wrote to the Buenos Aires Herald, “whilst containing some elements of truth was much exaggerated and in some instance pure lies.” 342

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 10

“Everything that is in the book happened, although of course in another order.” The “lies” he admits to Ignatieff are examples of his romanticism, as when he describes an ordinary stainless steel chair as being “by Mies van der Rohe” 349

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Question 11

He told not a half-truth but a truth and a half. 353

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Question 12

This version was less romantic but had the merit of being true. 403

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Question 13

‘He was very macho,’ she said, ‘like most Argentine boys, but I never thought it would come to that.’ 438

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Question 14

He loved his country with the passion of the second generation immigrant 467

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Question 15

He did his duty to his country and up-ended the chronology. He twisted the evidence to show that all hot-blooded mammals began in South America and went north. And then he got quite carried away: he published a paper suggesting that Man himself had emerged from the soil of the patria; which is why, in some circles, the name of Ameghino is set beside Plato and Newton. 479

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Question 16

‘My neighbours are Italian,’ Bill said. ‘The Its have got the whole region buttoned up. All came from one village in the Marches forty years back. 517

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 17

Do you know what we pray for down here? Pray for sadistically? Bad winter in Europe. Makes the price of wool go up.’ 554

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 18

The Indians were migrant workers from Southern Chile. They were Araucanian Indians. A hundred years ago the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave. They painted their bodies red and flayed their enemies alive and sucked at the hearts of the dead. 601

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Question 19

The Araucanians are still very tough and would be a lot tougher if they gave up drink. 606

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Question 20

The Patagonian. desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket of grey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed. 614

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Question 21

desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness 621

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Question 22

He was thirty-three (the age when geniuses die), 640

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Question 23

he made the common tourist’s mistake of confusing fifteen for fifty pesos.) 668

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Question 24

history of the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia belongs rather to the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America. 700

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Question 25

Port Madryn. A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. 716

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Question 26

the village of Gaimán, the centre of Welsh Patagonia today. 734

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Question 27

The colonists came with few possessions but they clung to their family clocks. 737

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Question 28

salmuera, made of vinegar, garlic, chillies and oregano. 769

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Question 29

‘Patagonia!’ he cried. ‘She is a hard mistress. She casts her spell. An enchantress! She folds you in her arms and never lets go.’ 852

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Question 30

The Persians had come to Patagonia as missionaries for their world religion. They had plenty of money and had stuffed the place with the trappings of middle-class Teheran—wine-red 918

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Question 31

A marble monument marks the spot. Its name is Biddmyrd os syrfeddod ‘There will be a myriad wonders…’—a 966

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Question 32

went north of Esquel to a small settlement called Epuyen. 977

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Question 33

The writer was Robert Leroy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, at that time heading the Pinkerton Agency’s list of most wanted criminals. 1101

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Question 34

Bob Parker took the name Cassidy and rode into a new life of wide horizons and the scent of horse leather. (Butch was the name of a borrowed gun.) 1116

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Question 35

The homesteaders loved him. Many were Mormons, outlawed themselves for polygamy. They gave him food, shelter, alibis, and occasionally their daughters. Today, he would be classed as a revolutionary. But he had no sense of political organization. Butch Cassidy never killed a man. Yet his friends were seasoned killers; 1130

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 36

A Dowd horse was ready for sale when its rider could balance a gun between its ears and fire. 1142

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 37

based on the skimpiest evidence, that the ‘family of 3’ died together in a shoot-out with the Uruguayan police in 1911. 1193

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Question 38

The Indian settlements were strung out along the railway line on the principle that a drunk could always get home. 1216

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Question 39

Rio Pico was once the German colony of Nueva Alemania, and the houses had a German look. 1300

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 40

LAS PAMPAS was twenty miles on from Rio Pico, the last settlement before the frontier. 1302

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Question 41

the men played taba. The taba is the astragalus bone of a cow. The player throws it ten paces on to a prepared circle of mud or sand. If it falls on its concave side, this is suerte (good luck) and he wins; on its rounded side, this is culo (arse) and he loses; and if it falls on its edge there is no play. 1317

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 42

I said Patagonia reminded me of Russia. 1369

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Question 43

The Police were criminals themselves, mostly Paraguayos; you had to be white or Christian to join. Everyone in Rio Pico liked the North Americans. 1449

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Question 44

Wherever there were Germans there were blue lupins. 1457

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Question 45

I found, in Patagonia, that people had the habit of underestimating age by ten to fifteen years. 1472

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 46

GOING DOWN to Comodoro Rivadavia I passed through a desert of black stones and came to Sarmiento. 1513

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 47

‘Different road,’ he sighed. ‘Same Divinity. 1623

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Question 48

The one noise you did hear was a guanaco. A noise like a baby trying to cry and sneeze at once. 1635

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Question 49

His favourite expression was concha de cotorra which means ‘parrot-cunt’. 1694

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 50

‘The unicorn,’ he said. ‘The famous unicorn. I know the place. We call it Cerro de los Indios.’ 1714

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Question 51

The river ran down to a lake, Lago Ghio, with water a bright milky turquoise. The shores were blinding white and the cliffs also were white, or striped horizontally white and terracotta. 1754

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 52

Few travellers have ever set eyes on the City. Nor is there any one opinion about its true location: the island of Patmos, the forests of Guyana, the Gobi Desert or the north face of Mount Meru are among the suggestions. All these are desolate places. The names of the City are equally various: Uttarakuru, Avalon, The New Jerusalem, The Isles of the Blessed. 1772

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 53

THE TOWN of Puerto Deseado is distinguished for a Salesian College that incorporates every architectural style from the Monastery of St Gall to a multi-storey car-park; a Gruta de Lourdes; and a railway station in the form and proportion of a big Scottish country house. 1807

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 54

We talked late into the night, arguing whether or not we, too, have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems; it seemed the only way to account for our insane restlessness. 1812

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 55

Penguins are monogamous, faithful unto death. Each pair occupies a minute stretch of territory and expels outsiders. The female lays from one to three eggs. There is no division of labour between the sexes: both go fishing and take turns to nurse the young. The colony breaks up with the cold weather in the first week of April. 1817

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 56

Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I’d want to murder. 1822

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Question 57

I PASSED through three boring towns, San Julián, Santa Cruz and Rio Gallegos. As you go south down the coast, the grass gets greener, the sheep-farms richer and the British more numerous. 1889

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 58

Patagonian sheep-farming began in 1877 when a Mr Henry Reynard, an English trader in Punta Arenas, ferried a flock from the Falklands and set it to graze on Elizabeth Island in the Strait. 1896

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Question 59

Menéndez died in 1918, leaving a proportion of his millions to Alphonso XIII of Spain, and was buried at Punta Arenas 1900

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Question 60

History may aspire to symmetry but rarely achieves it: 1980

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Question 61

‘Bad business. Bunch of Bolshie agitators came down and stirred up trouble. That was one thing. Then the Army came down and that was another. Shot good men. They shot good, honest, reliable men. They even shot my friends. It was a filthy business from start to finish.’ The leader of the revolt was called Antonio Soto. 2019

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 62

Antonio Soto recall a hulk of fallen muscle and an expression ranging from truculence to quiet despair. He lived in Punta Arenas then and ran a small restaurant. 2033

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Question 63

Perhaps they saw in in him the white saviour promised in their folklore. He called them to stop work and they obeyed; 2057

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Question 64

he was dreaming of a revolution that would spread from Patagonia and engulf the country. 2082

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Question 65

The end of Soto’s dream came at the Estancia La Anita, the prize establishment of the Menéndez family. 2099

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Question 66

I asked about the sect of male witches, known on Chiloé as the Brujería. 2153

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 67

Only men can become members, but the Sect does use women to carry urgent messages. A woman thus employed is known as the Voladora. 2178

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Question 68

The most singular creature associated with the Sect is the Invunche or Guardian of the Cave, a human being perverted into a monster by a special scientific process. 2190

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Question 69

No one can recall the memory of a time when the Central Committee did not exist. Some have suggested that the Sect was in embryo even before the emergence of Man. It is equally plausible that Man himself became Man through fierce opposition to the Sect. We know for a fact that the Challanco is the Evil Eye. Perhaps the term ‘Central Committee’ is a synonym for Beast. 2208

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 70

The coast of Tierra del Fuego was an ashy stripe less than two miles away. 2214

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Question 71

Tierra del Fuego—The Land of Fire. The fires were the campfires of the Fuegian Indians. In one version Magellan saw smoke only and called it Tierra del Humo, the Land of Smoke, but Charles V said there was no smoke without fire and changed the name. The Fuegians are dead and all the fires snuffed out. Only the flares of oil rigs cast a pall over the night sky. 2231

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 72

I had met the nuns of the Santa Maria Auxiliadora Convent on their Saturday coach outing to the penguin colony on Cabo Virgenes. A bus-load of virgins. Eleven thousand virgins. About a million penguins. Black and white. Black and white. Black and white. 2268

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Question 73

Rio Grande, the one town on the east side of the island. In the old days it flourished with the English meat trade. Now, temporarily it was given over to Israel. 2272

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Question 74

The Indians of Tierra del Fuego were the Ona and the Haush, who were foot hunters; and the Alakaluf and the Yaghan (or Yámana) who were canoe hunters. 2282

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 75

IN THE 1890s a crude version of Darwin’s theory, which had once germinated in Patagonia, returned to Patagonia and appeared to encourage the hunting of Indians. A slogan: ‘The Survival of the Fittest’, 2311

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Question 76

the Onas did have one swift and daring marksman called Täapelt, who specialized in picking off white murderers with cold selective justice. 2332

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Question 77

She quite liked Tierra del Fuego. She had walked in forests of notofagus antarctica. 2384

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Question 78

I WENT on to the southernmost town in the world. Ushuaia began with a prefabricated mission house put up in 1869 by the Rev. W. H. Stirling alongside the shacks of the Yaghan Indians. 2388

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Question 79

The last house before the barracks was the brothel. 2397

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Question 80

In Argentina the words ‘Russian’ and ‘Jew’ were synonymous. 2436

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Question 81

The Russian Revolution was in full swing. Graffiti reading ‘Freedom for Radowitzky!’ were smeared all over Buenos Aires. 2462

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Question 82

Simón Radowitzky died of a heart attack in 1956. 2493

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Question 83

The kidnapper was Captain Robert FitzRoy, R.N., Chief Officer of H.M.S. Beagle, now winding up her first survey of southern waters. 2516

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Question 84

Coming into Harberton from the land side, you could mistake it for a big estate in the Scottish Highlands, with its sheep fences, sturdy gates and peat-brown trout streams. 2629

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 85

Bridges’s dilemma is common enough. Finding in ‘primitive’ languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’, so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. 2652

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 86

The Yaghans were born wanderers though they rarely wandered far. 2682

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Question 87

Thomas Bridges coined the word ‘Yaghan’ after a place called Yagha: the Indians called themselves Yámana. Used as a verb yámana means ‘to live, breathe, be happy, recover from sickness or be sane’. 2686

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 88

Lucas Bridges was the first White to make friends with the Onas. They trusted him alone when men like the Red Pig were butchering their kin. The Uttermost Part of the Earth was one of my favourite books as a boy. In it he describes looking down from Mount Spión Kop on the sacred Lake Kami, 2700

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 89

IN THE Plaza de Armas a ceremony was in progress. It was one hundred years since Don José Menéndez set foot in Punta Arenas 2749

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 90

The Ministry bought this prize bull in New Zealand. No need for it! Plenty of good bulls next door in Argentina. But they couldn’t buy an Argentine bull, not without losing face. So they flew the bull from New Zealand to Santiago, flew it to Punta Arenas, where it was presented, 2819

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 91

CASILLA 182, Punta Arenas, an iron gate painted green, with crossed Ms twined about with Pre-Raphaelite lilies, led into a shadowy garden where still grew the plants of my grandmother’s generation: 2838

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 92

Panama was now cut through. Punta Arenas was again on the way to nowhere. 3276

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 93

Dawson Island. He took me along. I wanted to see the concentration camp where ministers of the Allende regime were held, 3330

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 94

Puerto Natales was a Red town ever since the meat-works opened up. The English built the meat-works during the First World War, four miles along the bay, where deep water ran inshore. They built a railway to bring the men to work; and when the place ran down, the citizens painted the engine and put it in the plaza—an ambiguous memorial. 3364

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 95

No culture without conversion 3439

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 96

had quarrelled with union thugs and had dodged their attempts on his life, in the course of which he had developed a theory that once you kill—or even plan to kill—you are doomed. 3469

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 97

The shepherd knew the Mylodon Cave well. He advised me to call first on Senor Eberhard, whose grandfather found the place. 3489

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Question 98

THE MYLODON was a Giant Ground Sloth, rather bigger than a bull, of a class unique to South America. 3526

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Question 99

Moreno got back to La Plata and took his piece of skin to London. He left it at the British Museum for safe-keeping, where it remains. 3573

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Question 100

the expedition of a Mr Hesketh Prichard to look for it. Prichard found no trace of the mylodon, but his book Through the Heart of Patagonia seems to have been an ingredient of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. 3579

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 101

I WALKED the four miles from Puerto Consuelo to the Cave. 3621

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 102

Walter Rauff is credited with the invention and administration of the Mobile Gas Truck. 3697

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Question 103

Butch Cassidy’s letter to Mrs Davis is in the Utah State Historical Society and reprinted with their permission. 3730

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In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin