very little elevated above
the level of the ocean. It is this which gives them their peculiar
characters. They do not contain, like the steppes of Southern
Asia, and the deserts of Persia, those lakes without issue, or
rivers which lose themselves in the sand or in subterraneous
filtrations. The Llanos of South America incline towards the east
and the south; their waters are tributary to the Orinoco, the
Amazon, or the Rio de la Plata.

"What most strongly characterizes the savannahs or steppes of
South America, is the entire absence of hills, or inequalities of
any kind. The soil, for hundreds of miles together, is perfectly
flat, without even a hillock. For this reason, the Castilian
conquerors, who penetrated first from Coro to the banks of the
Apure, named the regions to which they came, neither deserts, nor
savannahs, nor meadows, but _plains--los Llanos_. Over an extent
of thirty leagues square, you will often not meet with an eminence
a foot high. The resemblance to the sea which these immense plains
bear, strikes the imagination the more forcibly in those places,
often as extensive as half of France, where the surface is
absolutely destitute of palms, or any species of trees, and where
the distance is so great from the mountains, or the forests on the
shores of the Orinoco, as to render neither visible. The uniform
appearance which the Llanos exhibit, the extreme rarity of any
habitations, the fatigues of a journey under a burning sun, and in
an atmosphere perpetually clouded with dust, the prospect of a
round girdle of an horizon, which appears constantly to recede
before the traveller, the isolated stems of the palm-tree, all
precisely of the same form, and which he despairs to reach,
because he confounds them with other seemingly identical trunks
which appear in the distant parts of the horizon: all these causes
combine to make these steppes appear even more vast than they
really are.

"Yet are their actual dimensions so prodigious, that it is hard to
outstrip them, even by the wildest flights of the imagination. The
colonists, who inhabit the slopes of the mountains which form
their extreme boundary on the west and north, see the steppes
stretch away to the south and east, as far as the eye can reach,
an interminable ocean of verdure. Well may they deem it bou