STEPPES AND DESERTS. 11 



over warm heat-radiating continents. 7he venerable and 

 only lately appreciated father of .history, Herodotus, in 

 tne true spirit of an enlarged view of nature, described 

 the Deserts of northern Africa, of Yemen, of Kerman and 

 Mekran (the Gedrosia of the Greeks), and even as far as 

 Moultan, as forming a single connected sea of sand. ( 21 ) 



In addition to the action of these hot winds, there is (so 

 far as we know) an absence or comparative paucity in Africa 

 of large rivers, of widely extended forests producing coolness 

 and exhaling moisture, and of lofty mountains. Of moun- 

 tains covered with perpetual snow, we know only the 

 western part of the Atlas, ( 22 ) whose narrow range, seen 

 in profile from the Atlantic, appeared to the ancient 

 navigators when sailing along the coast as a single 

 detached lofty sky-supporting mount. The eastern pro- 

 longation of the chain extends nearly to Dakul, where 

 Carthage, once mistress of the seas, now lies in mouldering 

 ruins. As forming a long extended coast-chain, or Gsetulian 

 rampart, the effect of the Atlas range is to intercept the cool 

 north breezes, and the vapours which ascend from the 

 Mediterranean. 



The Mountains of the Moon, Djebel-al-Komr, ( 23 ) 

 (fabulously represented as forming part of a mountainous 

 parallel extending from the high plateaux of Habesh, an 

 African Quito, to the sources of the Senegal), were supposed 

 to rise above the limit of perpetual snow. The Cordillera 

 of Lupata, which extends along the eastern coast of 

 Mozambique and Monomotapa, as the Andes along the 



