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, brayed 

 the invasion of the waters. On quitting the mountain valleys of 

 Caraccas, and the island-studded Lake of Tacarigua, ( 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" ( 2 ) is the name given 'to them by the 

 natives ; as if language instinctively recalled the more ancient con- 

 dition 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 con- 

 stellations illumine the margin of the plain, or when their trembling 

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