HISTORY OF MADAGASCAR. 
83 
is the most salubrious in the island, and its soil, though 
to a great extent still untilled, has yet been brought under 
sufficient improvement and culture, to maintain a large 
population. 
From its extreme want of wood, the general appearance 
of Ankova is sterile, dreary, and uninteresting. The 
eye is fatigued with traversing its numerous hills and 
mountains in search of vegetation, as a relief from the 
dulness of the unvarying scene, which a country, generally 
destitute of brushwood, grove, or forest, presents. In the 
rainy, which is also the warm season, vegetation is ex¬ 
tremely rapid; the valleys, carpeted with the loveliest 
green, are then rich in luxuriant verdure, and even 
the ferruginous tops of the mountains, and the rounded 
summits of the thousand hills, clothed for a few months in 
the year with a coarse and dwarfish grass, assume an aspect 
of comparative cheerfulness. But in the dry, which is 
also the cold and wintry season, the appearance of the 
whole country, excepting the meadows, and a few spots 
artificially irrigated, is exceedingly barren. 
Ankova is divided into three chief parts or divisions; 
viz. Imerina, Imamo, and Vonizongo. Imerina gave name 
originally to the kingdom of Radama, and hence he has 
sometimes been spoken of as prince of Imerina} chieftain 
of Emerne,* king of the Hovas, &c. Imamo and Voni¬ 
zongo, were annexed to the district of Imerina during the 
reign of the father of Radama, and have ever since com¬ 
posed the kingdom of Ankova. 
In its external characteristics, the great part of Ankova 
may be considered hilly, rather than mountainous. Few 
of its highest mountains rise above five or six hundred 
* Emirne is the usual, but certainly incorrect, orthography, employed 
by French writers. 
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