Arthur Mangin

“ The scenes of the savage world unfold before our eyes like a moving panorama; unexpected incidents and dramatic episodes multiply one upon another. Every region appears before us with its primitive aspect, its grand and picturesque landscapes, its characteristic fauna and flora—frequently, also, with its tribes of white, or tawny, or black, or copper-coloured men, whose singular manners, brutal instincts, fierce passions, and wretched condition offer, in all its mournful reality, the spectacle of that “state of nature” celebrated by a great writer as the ideal of virtue and happiness. ”

“ Then the reptile begins to stir in the mud where he lay embedded; the herbivora return to their fresh pastures, and move towards the rivers and ponds in whose waters they may slake their thirst; the carnaria take the same road; they know that in the open plain they will find victims for their murderous jaws. The Desert is astir with strange sounds and mysterious voices; the air re-echoes the thousand discordant cries which ring from the mountains and the rocks; black shadows pass, re-pass, and flit to and fro, in every direction ”

“ He only walks on all fours when hotly pressed, and then his appearance is decidedly ungainly. In escaping from an enemy he rears himself upright, skims the plain with bounding leaps, and in a few minutes leaves behind him the swiftest horse or dog. But if all avenues of retreat be closed to him, he plants himself firmly against a tree or a rock and fights with obstinate courage, ripping up his assailants with his potent hind-feet, like a stag with his horns or a wild boar with his tusks. ”

“ The horizon draws suddenly nearer; the Steppe seems to contract, and a nameless terror seizes the heart of the wanderer. The hot dusty air increases in suffocating heat; and the east wind, blowing over the long-heated soil, yields no refreshment, but rather oppresses with its burning glow. The pools, hitherto protected from evaporation by the yellow fading branches of the fan palm, begin to disappear. As in the north the animals grow torpid with the mortal cold, so under the influence of the parching drought the boa and the crocodile fall asleep, buried deeply in the dry mud. ”

“ The Desert of Erosion is not completely inhabited. At intervals you meet with a few squalid villages, and a multitude of camel’s-skin tents are scattered like black spots over the yellow or grayish plains, on the borders of the chotts or scanty water-courses. Herds of goats and flocks of sheep wander in the valleys, browsing on the rare short grass. Columns of smoke arise from the Arab bivouacs, and the women of the Sahara group themselves around the wells and springs to fill the water-bags with which they load their asses. ”

“ Frequently you may see, on the sandy wastes of Africa, or the desolate plains of Asia and the New World, these carcasses laid out in two interminable rows; indicating the gloomy track which should be followed by the traveller, and never failing to remind him of the tribute Death levies upon mankind in these accursed regions. Thus does the Desert show itself more relentless than even the hungry ocean, which at least devours its victims whole, and affronts the eye with no traces of its murders. ”

“ The condor has the loftiest flight of all the winged race. He has been seen towering in the “blue serene,” on a level with the snow-crowned summit of Illimani, 23,000 feet above the sea, in a region where man cannot endure the excessive rarefaction of the air. When, in the fulness of time, civilization shall have conquered to itself the South American continent, the condor, flying for refuge to these brain-wildering heights among the icy peaks of the Cordillera, shall be, perhaps, in that quarter of the globe, the latest denizen of the Desert—the last representative of The Savage World. ”

“ There the sea of sand reveals itself in all its nakedness, in all its horrors; with its implacable sky and fiery atmosphere, its sandy billows, its masses of salt, and, in certain places, with its hidden quicksands capable of devouring entire armies. The Desert of Akhaf, situated towards the extremity of the peninsula, conceals, it is said, several of these abysses, where the hapless traveller, if he set his foot upon them, would be instantly swallowed up. Thus even the Arabs regard it with an unconquerable dread. ”

“ Sometimes, upon the plain, the eye discovers the monstrous skeleton of an animal which flourished in those remote times when the Alps still slept in the depths of ocean, and dreamed not of blending their snow-burdened peaks with the clouds. The Pampas serve as the burial-place for races of gigantic men, now extinct, who seem to issue from their silent graves in testimony to the former being of vanished generations, and to bear witness to the Creator of all things. Above your head, and far away in the azure of heaven, you perceive a black point ”

“ During the daytime silence and solitude prevail over the open plains. It is the hour when most animals seek, under the foliage of the trees, among the tall rank grasses, in the bosom of the waters or under the surface of the earth, a shelter against the swift burning arrows of the sun, and repose immovable in their different lairs. But when the great orb of day sinks towards the horizon, all Nature seems to awake. More imperious needs succeed to those of rest and slumber; hunger and thirst stimulate the most sluggish into exertion. ”

“ The most imposing spectacle presented by the Deserts of South America is that of their frequent hurricanes. As the Simoom to the Sahara, so is the Pampero to the Pampas. Its approach is foretold by signs which the native’s experienced eye readily recognizes. All at once the air seems stricken motionless, and over the solitude broods a solemn silence. A cloud white and light as snow—a cloud “no bigger than a man’s hand”—rises in the south-west. It advances, and as it advances enlarges its proportions. ”

“ Everywhere, also, immense steppes, intersected by swamps and relieved with woods of fir and birch, spread for leagues upon leagues in the dull light of a wintry sky, until they merge into those rent and rocky plains, bare of all vegetation except a few lichens and mosses, which are almost always encrusted in glittering snow and ice, and mingle in the distance with the frost-bound waters of the Arctic Sea. ”

“ Lower and lower descend the congregated vapours, until they envelop the earth in a funeral shroud, whose folds the hurricane incessantly agitates, and which the forked lightnings seem to rend in fragments. Suffocating gusts of a fiery wind traverse space. And now the sudden tempest stoops down from the summit of the Andes, and sweeps the Savannah with resistless fury. Enormous masses of sand, upgathered by the rafale, obscure the clearness of day; at noon the earth is covered with a darkness that may be felt. The thunder mingles its roar with the strident voices of the storm. ”

“ Their ideal East is very different from that actual East, in all its heat, and noisomeness, and glare, which the voyager finds around him, and which seems to have lost much of its beauty along with its grandeur and its power. Pleasant to the fancy is the palm-grove, pleasant the garden with its golden and purple fruitage, but the warm (and often mineral) waters which irrigate, or rather inundate the soil, exhale the most deleterious emanations, so that the unfortunate inhabitants are constantly decimated by fever, blinded by ophthalmic disease, and devoured by insects! ”

“ Not a single family of tropical plants but is here represented by several species. Hill and valley and plain alike are characterized by the exuberant growth of leaf and fruit and flower; the graceful forms might have enchanted an ancient Greek, the wealth of glowing and intense colour would have fired the imagination of Turner, and defied the palette of Titian or Tintoretto. There are landscapes of such beauty and fertility as the fancy of artist or poet never conceived. Ferns and Orchids are, perhaps, even more abundant here than in the forests of Java, Borneo, or Sumatra. ”

“ Nearly in the centre of this dismal wilderness lies an immense morass, whose surface is in many places incapable of supporting the lightest animal, and whose inexhaustible reservoirs supply the fountains of many a river and stream—the Dart, the Teign, the Taw, the Tavy—all clear as crystal in the summer months, but after heavy rains running redly through the “stony vales.” The roaring of these torrents, when angry and swollen, is sublime to a degree inconceivable by those who have never heard the wild impressive music of untamed Nature. ”

“ He can carry off, while in full career, and making the most rapid leaps, the heaviest prey—a kid, for instance, an antelope of full size, even a bull, it is said, and, necessarily, a man. Finally, his skin, symmetrically striped, like a zebra’s, with wavy bands of brown and black, on a reddish ground, with the contour of the face, the chin and belly of the purest white, defies all comparison. The stripes of his head, legs, and tail are disposed with irreproachable symmetry in curves of the most graceful character. ”

“ And if the illusion vanishes when, descending from the heights, you penetrate into the mazes of this Dædalian marvel, the reality is not less calculated to inspire you with astonishment, and the imagination remains confused before this wild, this grand, yet ominous freak of Nature—ominous, for the place seems like a colossal Golgotha, and the rocks may be the monuments consecrated by invisible hands to the things and creatures, the life and majesty, of a forgotten Past! ”

“ To the still small voice of Nature our ears are deafened by the clash and clang of an ever-active world; but we cannot refuse to listen to the roar of the ocean or the reverberation of the thunder. As we move swiftly onward in the press of the crowd and the race of life, we ignore the tiny blade and the delicate organism beneath our feet ”

“ Winter comes, and the shade of leafage falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal to the fancy of man, or provision for his service: cold juice, or glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin, medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm—and all these presented in forms of endless change. ”

“ The herbaceous mimosas, with renewed sensibility to the influence of light, open their drooping leaves to greet the rising sun; and the rosy-fingered morn is saluted with a glad chorus of birds, and by the opening blossoms of the water-plants. Now the horse bounds over the plain in keen ecstasy of spirit, and the cattle grazes plentifully on the fresh green herbage. Yet the new life is not without its peril. Anguis latet in herbâ. Among the tall thick grass lurks the spotted jaguar, the tiger of the New World, and measures carefully the distance that separates him from his unsuspecting victim. ”

“ Thus, then, in the mid Torrid Zone, we must accomplish a weary ascent of 13,000 to 15,000 feet before we can find ourselves transported from the calcined plains whose sands scorch and blister our feet, or the dense forests whose innermost depths teem with the most exuberant and beautiful floral life, to the heart of icy deserts and the sublime silence of the mountains. And in passing from one to the other of these extremes, we traverse in a few hours all the climates which succeed one another from the Equator to the Pole. ”

“ Finally, what grave problems does the Desert place before the man of science! And first, why do life and fertility prevail elsewhere,—here, sterility and death? Why does an irrevocable curse seem to weigh upon certain parts of the world, while others rejoice in Nature’s fairest gifts? It is by examining the constitution of the soil and the character of the climate that we discover the key to this enigma, and recognize in this apparent anomaly a necessary effect of the harmonious laws of the universe. ”