00 
MOUNTAIN CHAINS. 
rum*), as in Poland, where, far from the Carpathian moun- 
tains, the plain itself divides the waters between the Baltic 
and the Black Sea. Geographers, who suppose the existence 
of a chain of mountains wherever there is a line of divi- 
sion, hare not failed to mark one in the maps, at the sources 
of the liio Neveri, the Uuare, the Guarapiche, and the 
Pao. Thus the priests of Mongol race, according to ancient 
and superstitious custom, erect oboes, or little mounds of 
stone, on every point where the rivers flow in an opposite 
direction. 
The uniform landscape of the Llanos; the extremely 
small number of their inhabitants ; the fatigue of travelling 
beneath a burning sky, and an atmosphere darkened by 
dust ; the view of that horizon, which seems for ever to fly 
before us ; those lonely trunks of palm-trees, which have all 
the same aspect, and which we despair of reaching, because 
they are confounded with other trunks that rise by degrees 
on the visual horizon ; all these causes combine to make the 
steppes appear far more extensive than they are in reality. 
The planters who inhabit the southern declivity of the chain 
of the coast see the steppes extend towards the south, as far 
as the eye can reach, like an ocean of verdure. They know 
that from the Delta of the Orinoco to the province of 
Varinas, and thence, by traversing the banks of the Meta, 
the Guaviare, and the Caguan, they can advance three 
hundred and eighty leaguesf into the plains, first from east 
to west, and then from north-east to south-east beyond the 
Equator, to the foot of the Andes of Pasto. They know by 
the accounts of travellers the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, 
which are also Llanos covered with fine grass, destitute 
of trees, and filled with oxen and horses become wild. 
They suppose that, according to the greater part of our 
maps of America, this continent has only one chain of moun- 
tains, that of the Andes, which stretches from south to 
north ; and they form a vague idea of the contiguity of all 
the plains from the Orinoco and the Apure to the Bio de la 
Plata and the Straits of Magellan, 
Without stopping here to give a mineralogieal description 
* “ C. Manlium prope jugis [Tauri] ad divortia aquarum castr* 
^suisse/* Livy, lib. 38, c. 75. 
f This is the distance from Timbuctoo to the northern coast of Africa* 
