wearied ox and horse enjoy no repose. Huge bats now
attack the animals during sleep, and vampire-like suck their blood; or,
fastening on their backs, raise festering wounds, in which mosquitoes,
hippobosces, and a host of other stinging insects burrow and nestle.

When, after a long drought, the genial season of rain arrives, the scene
suddenly changes. The deep azure of the hitherto cloudless sky assumes a
lighter hue. Scarcely can the dark space in the constellation of the
Southern Cross be distinguished at night. The mild phosphorescence of
the Magellanic clouds fades away. Like some distant mountain, a single
cloud is seen rising perpendicularly on the southern horizon. Misty
vapors collect and gradually overspread the heavens, while distant
thunder proclaims the approach of the vivifying rain. Scarcely is the
surface of the earth moistened before the teeming steppe becomes covered
with a variety of grasses. Excited by the power of light, the herbaceous
mimosa unfolds its dormant, drooping leaves, hailing, as it were, the
rising sun in chorus with the matin song of the birds and the opening
flowers of aquatic plants. Horses and oxen, buoyant with life and
enjoyment, roam over and crop the plains. The luxuriant grass hides the
beautifully spotted jaguar, who, lurking in safe concealment, and
carefully measuring the extent of his leap, darts, like the Asiatic
tiger, with a cat-like bound upon his passing prey. At times, according
to the accounts of the natives, the humid clay on the banks of the
morasses is seen to rise slowly in broad flakes. Accompanied with a
violent noise, as on the eruption of a small mud-volcano, the upheaved
earth is hurled high into the air. Those who are familiar with the
phenomenon fly from it; for a colossal water-snake, or a mailed and
scaly crocodile, awakened from its trance by the first fall of rain,
is about to burst from its tomb.

When the rivers bounding the plain to the south, as the Arauca, the
Apure, and the Payara, gradually overflow their banks, nature compels
those creatures to live as amphibious animals, which, during the first
half of the year, were perishing with thirst on the waterless and dusty
plain. A part of the steppe now presents the appearance of a vast inland
sea. The mares retreat with their foals to the higher banks, which
project, like islands, above the spreading waters. Day by day the dry
surface diminishes in extent. The cattle, crowded together, and deprive