| OCR Text |
Show •, .. ASPECTS OF NATURE IN DIFFERENT LANDS AND DIFFERENT CLIMATES. STEPPES AND DESERTS. A WIDELY extended and apparently interminable plain stretches from the southern base of the lofty granitic crest, which, in the youth of our planet, when the Caribbean gulf was formed, braved the invasion of the waters. On quitting the mountain valleys of Caraccas, and the island-studded Lake ofTacarigua, (1) whose surface reflects the stems of plantains and bananas, and on leaving behind him meads adorned with the bright and tender green of the Tahitian sugar-cane or the darker verdure of the Cacao groves, the traveller, looking southward, sees unroll before him Steppes receding until they vanish in the far horizon. Fresh from the richest luxuriance of organic life, he treads at once the desolate margin of a treeless desert. Neither hill nor cliff rises, like an island in the ocean, to break the uniformity of the boundless plain ; only here and there broken strata of limestone, several hundred square miles in extent, appear sensibly higher than the adjoining parts. "Banks" C) is the name given to them by the natives; as if language instinctively recalled the more ancient condition of the globe, when those elevations were shoals, and the Steppes themselves were the bottom of a great Mediterranean sea. Even at the present time, nocturnal illusion still recalls these images of the past. When the rapidly rising and descending constellations illumine the margin of the plain, or when their trembling 3 |
