That arduous, protracted voyage took place, as if I could forget, in the August of 1804. On the first of that month, we set out for Buenos Aires during a terrible freeze, horseshoes cracking at blades of hoarfrost, a blue-tinged pink in the dawn, but within a few short days we found ourselves embroiled in a summer as squalid as it was cruel. We made progress ten times faster on the trek from Buenos Aires to the city, Santa Fé, than we did on the return journey, though there were just four of us on horseback that time, and despite countless obstacles and the cold always tormenting us, even in full sunlight. And so this sudden onset of sweltering heat was doubly confounding, both for its great intensity and for its unseasonable arrival, contradicting the laws of nature and the order of the seasons. How little nature takes our plans into account; she proved insolent, opposing the laws that contain her, with that strange heat in the depths of one of the bleakest winters the region, according to numerous testimonials, had suffered.
