And as for solitariness; the great forests of the north, the expanses ofunnavigated waters, the Greenland ice-fields, are the profoundest ofsolitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tidesand seasons mitigates their terror; because, though unvisited by men,those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiarstars 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 whichexalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to themchange never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut bythe Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; whilealready reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little moreupon them. The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rainnever falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, theyare cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. "Have mercyupon me," the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, "and sendLazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool mytongue, for I am tormented in this flame."

Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness. Itis deemed a fit type of all-forsaken overthrow, that the jackal shouldden in the wastes of weedy Babylon; but the Encantadas refuse to harboreven the outcasts of the beasts. Man and wolf alike disown them. Littlebut 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 ahiss.

On most of the isles where vegetation is found at all, it is moreungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wirybushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deepfissures of calcined rock, and treacherously masking them; or a parchedgrowth of distorted cactus trees.