104 
HEMS OF WELD ANIMALS 
ordinary visual horizon. I need not mention those tracts 
destitute of vegetation, which appear like large lakes with 
an undulating surface. This phenomenon, observed in very 
remote times, has occasioned the mirage to receive in 
Sanscrit the expressive name of desire of the antelope. W e 
admire the frequent allusions in the Indian, Persian, and 
Arabic poets, to the magical effects of terrestrial refraction. 
It was scarcely known to the Greeks and Homans. Proud 
of the riches of their soil, and the mild temperature of the 
air, they would have felt no envy of this poetry of the 
desert. It had its birth in Asia; and the oriental poets 
found its source in the nature of the country they in- 
habited. They were inspired with the aspect of those vast 
solitudes, interposed like arms of the sea or gulfs, between 
lands which nature had adorned with her most luxuriant 
fertility. 
The plain assumes at sunrise a more animated aspect. 
The cattle, which had reposed during the night along 
the pools, or beneath clumps of mauritias and rhopalas, 
w r ere now collected in herds ; and these solitudes became 
peopled with horses, mules, and oxen, that live here free, 
rather than wild, without settled habitations, and disdaining 
the care and protection of man. In these hot climates, 
the oxen, though of Spanish breed, like those of the cold 
table-lands of Quito, are of a gentle disposition. A 
traveller runs no risk of being attacked or pursued, as we 
often were in our excursions on the back of the Cordilleras, 
where the climate is rude, the aspect of the country more 
wild, and food less abundant. As we approached Caiabozo, 
we saw herds of roebucks browsing peacefully in the midst 
of horses and oxen. They are called mataeani; their flesh 
is good ; they are a little larger than our roes, and resemble 
deer with a very sleek skin, of a fawn-colour, spotted with 
white. Their horns appear to me to have single points. 
They had little fear of the presence of man : and in herds 
of thirty or forty we. observed several that were entirely 
white. This variety, common enough among the large stags 
of the cold climates of the Andes, surprised us in these low 
and burning plains. I have since learned, that even the 
jaguar, in the hot regions of Paraguay, sometimes affords 
albino ’varieties, the skin of which is of such uniform white- 
