Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Almost Destitute Of
Vegetation, It Reminds Us Of Gobi, In Mongolia.)
The same phenomena are repeated in the most distant regions; and,
instead of designating those vast treeless plains in accordance
With
the nature of the plants they produce, it seems natural to class them
into deserts, steppes, or savannahs; into bare lands without any
appearance of vegetation, and lands covered with gramina or small
plants of the dicotyledonous tribe. The savannahs of America,
especially those of the temperate zone, have in many works been
designated by the French term prairies; but this appears to me little
applicable to pastures which are often very dry, though covered with
grass of four or five feet in height. The Llanos and the Pampas of
South America are really steppes. They are covered with beautiful
verdure in the rainy season, but in the time of great drought they
assume the aspect of a desert. The grass is then reduced to powder;
the earth cracks; the alligators and the great serpents remain buried
in the dried mud, till awakened from their long lethargy by the first
showers of spring. These phenomena are observed on barren tracts of
fifty or sixty leagues in length, wherever the savannahs are not
traversed by rivers; for on the borders of rivulets, and around little
pools of stagnant water, the traveller finds at certain distances,
even during the period of the great droughts, thickets of mauritia, a
palm, the leaves of which spread out like a fan, and preserve a
brilliant verdure.
The steppes of Asia are all beyond the tropics, and form very elevated
table-lands. America also has savannahs of considerable extent on the
backs of the mountains of Mexico, Peru, and Quito; but its most
extensive steppes, the Llanos of Cumana, Caracas, and Meta, are little
raised above the level of the ocean, and all belong to the equinoctial
zone. These circumstances give them a peculiar character. They have
not, like the steppes of southern Asia, and the deserts of Persia,
those lakes without issue, those small systems of rivers which lose
themselves either in the sands, or by subterranean filtrations. The
Llanos of America incline to the east and south; and their running
waters are branches of the Orinoco.
The course of these rivers once led me to believe, that the plains
formed table-lands, raised at least from one hundred to one hundred
and fifty toises above the level of the ocean. I supposed that the
deserts of interior Africa were also at a considerable height; and
that they rose one above another as in tiers, from the coast to the
interior of the continent. No barometer has yet been carried into the
Sahara. With respect to the Llanos of America, I found by barometric
heights observed at Calabozo, at the Villa del Pao, and at the mouth
of the Meta, that their height is only forty or fifty toises above the
level of the sea. The fall of the rivers is extremely gentle, often
nearly imperceptible; and therefore the least wind, or the swelling of
the Orinoco, causes a reflux in those rivers that flow into it.
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