The Northern Desert of Africa divides two races of men who belong originally to the same part of the globe, and whose unreconciled discord appears as ancient as the mythus of Osiris and Typhon.[44] North of the Atlas there dwell nations with long and straight hair, of sallow complexion and Caucasian features. On the south of the Senegal, towards Soudan, live hordes of negroes in many different stages of civilization. In Central Asia, the Mongolian Steppe divides Siberian barbarism from the ancient civilisation of the peninsula of India. The South American Steppes form the boundary of a partial European cultivation.[45] To the north, between the mountains of Venezuela and the Caribbean sea, we find commercial cities, neat villages, and carefully cultivated fields. Even the love of art and scientific culture, together with the noble desire of civil freedom, have long been awakened there. Towards the south the Steppe terminates in a savage wilderness. Forests, the growth of thousands of years, fill with their impenetrable fastnesses the humid regions between the Orinoco and the Amazons. Massive leaden-coloured granite rocks[46] narrow the bed of the foaming rivers. Mountains and forests resound with the thunder of the falling waters, with the roar of the tiger-like jaguar, and with the melancholy rain-announcing howlings of the bearded apes.[47] Where a sand-bank is left dry by the shallow current, the unwieldly crocodiles lie, with open jaws, as motionless as pieces of rock and often covered with birds.[48] The boa serpent, his body marked like a chess-board, coiled up, his tail wound round the branch of a tree, lies lurking on the bank secure of his prey; he marks the young bull or some feebler inhabitant of the forest as it fords the stream, and swiftly uncoiling seizes the victim, and covering it with mucus forces it laboriously down his swelling throat.[49] In the midst of this grand and savage nature live many tribes of men, isolated from each other by the extraordinary diversity of their languages: some are nomadic, wholly unacquainted with agriculture, and using ants, gums, and earth as food[50]; these, as the Otomacs and Jarures, seem a kind of outcasts from humanity: others, like the Maquiritares and Macos, are settled, more intelligent and of milder manners, and live on fruits which they have themselves reared. Large spaces between the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo are only inhabited by the tapir and the social apes, and are wholly destitute of human beings. Figures graven on the rocks[51] shew that even these deserts were once the seat of some degree of intellectual cultivation. They bear witness to the changeful destinies of man, as do the unequally developed flexible languages; which latter belong to the oldest and most imperishable class of historic memorials.