The Desert Pampas. 
5 
in Vast fluctuations fixed/ ^ but in comparative 
calm— I should like to conduct the reader in ima- 
gination : a country all the easier to be imagined 
on account of the absence of mountains, woods, 
lakes, and rivers. There is, indeed, little to be 
imagined — not even a sense of vastness ; and 
Darwin^ touching on this point, in the Journal of a 
Naturalist^ aptly says 2 — At sea, a person’s eye 
being six feet above the surface of the water, his 
horizon is two miles and four- fifths distant. In 
like manner, the more level the plain, the more 
nearly does the horizon approach within these 
narrow limits; and this, in my opinion, entirely 
destroys the grandeur which one would have 
imagined that a vast plain would have possessed.’’ 
I remember my first experience of a hill, after 
having been always shut within these narrow 
limits.” It was one of the rano;e of sierras near 
Cape Corrientes, and not above eight hundred feet 
high ; yet, when I had gained the summit, I was 
amazed at the vastness of the earth, as it appeared 
to me from that modest elevation. Persons born 
and bred on the pampas, when they first visit a 
mountainous district, frequently experience a 
sensation as of a ball in the throat/’ which seems 
to prevent free respiration. 
In most places the rich, dry soil is occupied by a 
coarse grass, three or four feet high, growing in 
large tussocks, and all the year round of a deep 
green; a few slender herbs and trefoils, with long, 
twining stems, maintain a frail existence among 
the tussocks ; but the strong grass crowds out 
most plants, and scarcely a flower relieves its 
