Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE PAMPAS AND THE PAMPEANS. The variations of climate in the Pampas are most regular. It experiences a great difference of temperature between summer and winter. The latter season there is almost as cold as the month of December in France. There is no snow, however, but in the morning the ground is always covered with hoarfrost. Ice never becomes more than about an inch and a half thick. On the other hand, the heat of summer is overwhelming. At dawn the horizon forms a dark and dense line, lit slowly by the rising sun; the thick grass of these immense plains is then seen to give off a part of the beneficent morning dew, which, in evaporation, produces mostsingular effects of mirage. The strength of the sun makes itself acutely felt in all living creatures. The horses and wild oxen, by which these plains are peopled, experience so much fatigue as to give themselves up, like the men, to a siesta that seems for all a rest as natural as necessary. Throughout the Pampas, sensible differences of atmosphere are found. In the wooded regions of the Mamouelches, the air is more dry; and in creatures of whatever sort no appearance of perspiration is to be found. I have many times seen animals killed by heat lying on the arid plain, dried in their skins; but in the latitude of Buenos Ayr.es and of White Bay, in seventy and seventy-one degrees of latitude?regions in which the most beautiful lucern-grass imaginable abounds?vegetation clearly shows the moisture of the climate. The dews in these regions resemble rather fine rain or heavy mists. Dead animal flesh rapidlydecays there, and wounds are very difficult of cure. Will it be believed, however, that, in spite of this constant humidity, the Indians all sleep almost naked on the ground without ever being inconvenienced...
Synopsis
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