The Mountains of the Moon, Djebel-al-Komr,[23] (fabulously represented as forming part of a mountainous parallel extending from the high plateaux of Habesh, an African Quito, to the sources of the Senegal), were supposed to rise above the limit of perpetual snow. The Cordillera of Lupata, which extends along the eastern coast of Mozambique and Monomotapa, as the Andes along the western coast of Peru, is believed to be covered with perpetual snow in the gold districts of Machinga and Mocanga. But all these mountains, with the abundant waters to which they give rise, are far remote from the immense Desert which stretches from the southern declivity of the Atlas to the Niger.
Possibly, however, all the causes of heat and dryness which have been enumerated may have been insufficient to transform such considerable parts of the African plains into a dreadful desert, without the concurrence of some revolution of nature,—such, for instance, as an irruption of the ocean, whereby these flat regions may have been despoiled of their coating of vegetable soil, as well as of the plants which it nourished. Profound obscurity veils the period of such an event, and the force which determined the irruption. Perhaps it may have been caused by the great “rotatory current”[24] which sends the warmer water of the Mexican gulf over the banks of Newfoundland and to the shores of the old continent, and causes West India cocoa-nuts and other tropical fruits to reach the coasts of Ireland and Norway. There is still at least at the present time, an arm of this current directed from the Azores to the south-east, which sometimes produces disasters by carrying ships upon the west coast of Africa, which it strikes at a part lined by sand-hills. Other sea coasts (I particularly recall that of Peru between Amotape and Coquimbo) shew that in these hot regions of the earth, where rain never falls and where neither Lecideas nor other Lichens[25] germinate, centuries and perhaps thousands of years may elapse before the moveable sand can afford to the roots of plants a secure holding place.
These considerations are sufficient to explain why, with an external similarity of form, Africa and South America present so marked a difference of character both in respect to climate and to vegetation. But although the South American Steppe is covered with a thin coating of mould or fertile earth, and although it is periodically bathed by rains, and becomes covered at such seasons with luxuriantly sprouting herbage, yet it never could attract the surrounding nations or tribes to forsake the beautiful mountain valleys of Caraccas, the margin of the sea, or the wooded banks of the Orinoco, for the treeless and springless wilderness; and thus, previous to the arrival of European and African settlers, the Steppe was almost entirely devoid of human inhabitants.
The Llanos are, indeed, well suited to the rearing of cattle, but the care of animals yielding milk[26] was almost unknown to the original inhabitants of the New Continent. Hardly any of the American tribes have ever availed themselves of the advantages which nature offered them in this respect. The American race (which, with the exception of the Esquimaux, is one and the same from 65° North to 55° South latitude), has not passed from the state of hunters to that of cultivators of the soil through the intermediate stage of a pastoral life. Two kinds of native cattle (the Buffalo and the Musk Ox) feed in the northern prairies of western Canada and the plains of arctic America, in Quivira, and around the colossal ruins of the Aztec fortress which rises in the wilderness, like an American Palmyra, on the solitary banks of the Gila. The long-horned Rocky Mountain Sheep abounds on the arid limestone rocks of California. The Vicunas, Huanacos, Alpacas, and Lamas, belong to South America; but the two first named of all these useful animals, i. e., the Buffalo and the Musk Ox, have retained their natural freedom for two thousand years, and the use of milk and cheese, like the possession and cultivation of farinaceous grasses,[27] has remained a distinguishing characteristic of the nations of the old world.
If some of the latter have crossed from northern Asia to the west coast of America, and if, keeping by preference to the cooler mountain regions,[28] they have followed the lofty ridge of the Andes towards the south, their migration must have taken place by ways in which they could not be accompanied by their flocks and herds, or bring with them the cultivation of corn. When the long shaken empire of the Hiongnu fell, may we conjecture that the movement of this powerful tribe may also have occasioned in the north-east of China and in Corea a shock and an impulse which may have caused civilized Asiatics to pass over into the new continent? If such a migration had consisted of inhabitants of the Steppes in which agriculture was not pursued, this hazardous hypothesis (which has hitherto been but little favoured by the comparison of languages) would at least explain the striking absence of the Cereals in America. Possibly one of those Asiatic priestly colonies whom mystic dreams sometimes impelled to embark in long voyages, (of which the history of the peopling of Japan[29] in the time of Thsinchi-huang-ti offers a memorable example), may have been driven by storms to the coasts of New California.
If, then, pastoral life, that beneficent middle stage which attaches nomadic hunting hordes to desirable pastures and prepares them, as it were, for agriculture, has remained unknown to the aboriginal nations of America, this circumstance sufficiently explains the absence of human inhabitants in the South American Steppes. This absence has allowed the freest scope for the abundant development of the most varied forms of animal life; a development limited only by their mutual pressure, and similar to that of vegetable life in the forests of the Orinoco, where the Hymenæa and the gigantic laurel are never exposed to the destructive hand of man, but only to the pressure of the luxuriant climbers which twine around their massive trunks. Agoutis, small spotted antelopes, cuirassed armadilloes, which, like rats, startle the hare in its subterranean holes, herds of lazy chiguires, beautifully striped viverræ which poison the air with their odour, the large maneless lion, spotted jaguars (often called tigers) strong enough to drag away a young bull after killing him;—these and many other forms of animal life[30] wander through the treeless plain.
Thus almost exclusively inhabited by these wild animals, the Steppe would offer little attraction or means of subsistence to those nomadic native hordes, who, like the Asiatics of Hindostan, prefer vegetable nutriment, if it were not for the occasional presence of single individuals of the fan palm, the Mauritia. The benefits of this life-supporting tree are widely celebrated; it alone, from the mouth of the Orinoco to north of the Sierra de Imataca, feeds the unsubdued nation of the Guaranis.[31] When this people were more numerous and lived in closer contiguity, not only did they support their huts on the cut trunks of palm trees as pillars on which rested a scaffolding forming the floor, but they also, it is said, twined from the leaf-stalks of the Mauritia cords and mats, which, skilfully interwoven and suspended from stem to stem, enabled them in the rainy season, when the Delta is overflowed, to live in the trees like the apes. The floor of these raised cottages is partly covered with a coating of damp clay, on which the women make fires for household purposes,—the flames appearing at night from the river to be suspended high in air. The Guaranis still owe the preservation of their physical, and perhaps also their moral, independence, to the half-submerged, marshy soil over which they move with a light and rapid step, and to their elevated dwellings in the trees,—a habitation never likely to be chosen from motives of religious enthusiasm by an American Stylites.[32] But the Mauritia affords to the Guaranis not merely a secure dwelling-place, but also various kinds of food. Before the flower of the male palm tree breaks through its tender sheath, and only at that period of vegetable metamorphosis, the pith of the stem of the tree contains a meal resembling sago, which, like the farina of the jatropha root, is dried in thin bread-like slices. The fermented juice of the tree forms the sweet intoxicating palm wine of the Guaranis. The scaly fruits, which resemble in their appearance reddish fir cones, afford, like the plaintain and almost all tropical fruits, a different kind of nutriment, according as they are eaten after their saccharine substance is fully developed, or in their earlier or more farinaceous state. Thus in the lowest stage of man’s intellectual development, we find the existence of an entire people bound up with that of a single tree; like the insect which lives exclusively on a single part of a particular flower.
Since the discovery of the New Continent, the Llanos have become habitable to men. In order to facilitate communication between the Orinoco country and the coasts, towns have been built here and there on the banks of the streams which flow through the Steppes.[33] The rearing of cattle has began over all parts of these vast regions. Huts, formed of reeds tied together with thongs and covered with skins, are placed at distances of a day’s journey from each other; numberless herds of oxen, horses, and mules, estimated at the peaceful epoch of my journey at a million and a half, roam over the Steppe. The immense multiplication of these animals, originally brought by man from the Old Continent, is the more remarkable from the number of dangers with which they have to contend.
When, under the vertical rays of the never-clouded sun, the carbonized turfy covering falls into dust, the indurated soil cracks asunder as if from the shock of an earthquake. If at such times two opposing currents of air, whose conflict produces a rotatory motion, come in contact with the soil, the plain assumes a strange and singular aspect. Like conical-shaped clouds[34] the points of which descend to the earth, the sand rises through the rarified air in the electrically charged centre of the whirling current; resembling the loud waterspout dreaded by the experienced mariner. The lowering sky sheds a dim, almost straw-coloured light on the desolate plain. The horizon draws suddenly nearer; the Steppe seems to contract, and with it the heart of the wanderer. The hot dusty particles which fill the air increase its suffocating heat,[35] and the east wind, blowing over the long-heated soil, brings with it no refreshment, but rather a still more burning glow. The pools which the yellow fading branches of the fan palm had protected from evaporation now gradually disappear. As in the icy north the animals become torpid with cold, so here, under the influence of the parching drought, the crocodile and the boa become motionless and fall asleep, deeply buried in the dry mud. Every where the death-threatening drought prevails, and yet, by the play of the refracted rays of light producing the phenomenon of the mirage, the thirsty traveller is every where pursued by the illusive image of a cool rippling watery mirror.[36] The distant palm bush apparently raised by the influence of the contact of unequally heated and therefore unequally dense strata of air, hovers above the ground, from which it is separated by a narrow intervening margin. Half concealed by the dark clouds of dust, restless with the pain of thirst and hunger, the horses and cattle roam around, the cattle lowing dismally, and the horses stretching out their long necks and snuffing the wind, if haply a moister current may betray the neighbourhood of a not wholly dried up pool. More sagacious and cunning, the mule seeks a different mode of alleviating his thirst. The ribbed and spherical melon-cactus[37] conceals under its prickly envelope a watery pith. The mule first strikes the prickles aside with his fore feet, and then ventures warily to approach his lips to the plant and drink the cool juice. But resort to this vegetable fountain is not always without danger, and one sees many animals that have been lamed by the prickles of the cactus.
When the burning heat of the day is followed by the coolness of the night, which in these latitudes is always of the same length, even then the horses and cattle cannot enjoy repose. Enormous bats suck their blood like vampires during their sleep, or attach themselves to their backs, causing festering wounds, in which musquitoes, hippobosces, and a host of stinging insects, niche themselves. Thus the animals lead a painful life during the season when, under the fierce glow of the sun, the soil is deprived of its moisture. At length, after the long drought, the welcome season of the rain arrives; and then how suddenly is the scene changed![38] The deep blue of the hitherto perpetually cloudless sky becomes lighter; at night the dark space in the constellation of the Southern Cross is hardly distinguishable; the soft phosphorescent light of the Magellanic clouds fades away; even the stars in Aquila and Ophiucus in the zenith shine with a trembling and less planetary light. A single cloud appears in the south, like a distant mountain, rising perpendicularly from the horizon. Gradually the increasing vapours spread like mist over the sky, and now the distant thunder ushers in the life-restoring rain. Hardly has the surface of the earth received the refreshing moisture, before the previously barren Steppe begins to exhale sweet odours, and to clothe itself with Kyllingias, the many panicules of the Paspalum, and a variety of grasses. The herbaceous mimosas, with renewed sensibility to the influence of light, unfold their drooping slumbering leaves to greet the rising sun; and the early song of birds, and the opening blossoms of the water plants, join to salute the morning. The horses and cattle now graze in full enjoyment of life. The tall springing grass hides the beautifully spotted jaguar, who lurking in safe concealment, and measuring carefully the distance of a single bound, springs, cat-like, as the Asiatic tiger, on his passing prey.