nough;
but, like all else which has but once been associated with humanity,
they still awaken in us some thoughts of sympathy, however sad. Hence,
even the Dead Sea, along with whatever other emotions it may at times
inspire, does not fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his less
unpleasurable feelings.

And as for solitariness; the great forests of the north, the expanses of
unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice-fields, are the profoundest of
solitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tides
and seasons mitigates their terror; because, though unvisited by men,
those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiar
stars even as Lake Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine Polar day,
the irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully as malachite.

But the special curse, as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that which
exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to them
change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut by
the Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; while
already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more
upon them. The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rain
never falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they
are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. "Have mercy
upon me," the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, "and send
Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my
tongue, for I am tormented in this flame."

Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness. It
is deemed a fit type of all-forsaken overthrow, that the jackal should
den in the wastes of weedy Babylon; but the Encantadas refuse to harbor
even the outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Little
but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders,
snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the _aguano_.
No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a
hiss.

On most of the isles where vegetation is found at all, it is more
ungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wiry
bushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep
fissures of calcined rock, and treacherously masking them; or a parched
growth of distorted cactus trees.

In many places the coast is rock-bound, or, more properly,
clinker-bound; tumbled masses of blackish or gre