Although this we have now said be not
continually so, for as [1513]Acosta truly saith, under the Equator
itself, is a most temperate habitation, wholesome air, a paradise of
pleasure: the leaves ever green, cooling showers. But it holds in such
as are intemperately hot, as [1514]Johannes a Meggen found in Cyprus,
others in Malta, Aupulia, and the [1515]Holy Land, where at some
seasons of the year is nothing but dust, their rivers dried up, the air
scorching hot, and earth inflamed; insomuch that many pilgrims going
barefoot for devotion sake, from Joppa to Jerusalem upon the hot sands,
often run mad, or else quite overwhelmed with sand, profundis arenis,
as in many parts of Africa, Arabia Deserta, Bactriana, now Charassan,
when the west wind blows [1516]Involuti arenis transeuntes necantur.
[1517]Hercules de Saxonia, a professor in Venice, gives this cause why
so many Venetian women are melancholy, Quod diu sub sole degant, they
tarry too long in the sun. Montanus, consil. 21, amongst other causes
assigns this; Why that Jew his patient was mad, Quod tam multum
exposuit se calori et frigori: he exposed himself so much to heat and
cold, and for that reason in Venice, there is little stirring in those
brick paved streets in summer about noon, they are most part then
asleep: as they are likewise in the great Mogol's countries, and all
over the East Indies. At Aden in Arabia, as [1518] Lodovicus
Vertomannus relates in his travels, they keep their markets in the
night, to avoid extremity of heat; and in Ormus, like cattle in a
pasture, people of all sorts lie up to the chin in water all day long.
At Braga in Portugal; Burgos in Castile; Messina in Sicily, all over
Spain and Italy, their streets are most part narrow, to avoid the
sunbeams. The Turks wear great turbans ad fugandos solis radios, to
refract the sunbeams; and much inconvenience that hot air of Bantam in
Java yields to our men, that sojourn there for traffic; where it is so
hot, [1519]that they that are sick of the pox, lie commonly bleaching
in the sun, to dry up their sores. Such a complaint I read of those
isles of Cape Verde, fourteen degrees from the Equator, they do male
audire: [1520]One calls them the unhealthiest clime of the world, for
fluxes, fevers, frenzies, calentures, which commonly seize on seafaring
men that touch at them, and all by reason of a hot distemperature of
the air. The hardiest men are offended with this heat, and stiffest
clowns cannot resist it, as Constantine affirms, Agricult. l. 2. c. 45.
They that are naturally born in such air, may not [1521]endure it, as
Niger records of some part of Mesopotamia, now called Diarbecha:
Quibusdam in locis saevienti aestui adeo subjecta est, ut pleraque
animalia fervore solis et coeli extinguantur, 'tis so hot there in some
places, that men of the country and cattle are killed with it; and
[1522]Adricomius of Arabia Felix, by reason of myrrh, frankincense, and
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