The pennant hangs lazily from the mast; the water-casks are empty; the torments of thirst, aggravated by the heat of a vertical sun, become intolerable. But, suddenly, as if by magic, a beautiful island rises from the floods; waving palm-trees seem to welcome the mariner: he fancies he hears the purling of the brook and the splashing of the waterfall. Yet still the vessel moves not from the spot, and soon the fading phantom that mocked his misery leaves him the victim of increased despair. Similar delusions of the _mirage_, produced by the refraction of the light as it passes through atmospherical strata of unequal warmth, and consequently of unequal density, likewise take place over the surface of the Llanos, which then assume the semblance of a sea, heaving and rocking in wave-like motion. In the Lybian desert, in the dread solitudes of the polar ocean, in every zone, we meet with the same phenomenon, produced by the same cause. As in the arctic regions the intense cold during winter retards the pulsations, or even suspends the operations of life, so in the Llanos the long continuance of drought causes a similar stagnation in animated nature. The thinly-scattered trees and shrubs do not indeed cast their foliage, but the greyish-yellow of their leaves announces that vegetation is suspended. Buried in the clay of the dried-up pools, the alligator and the water-boa lie plunged in a deep summer-sleep, like the bear of the north in his long winter slumber; and many animals which, at other times, are found roaming over the Llanos,--such as the graceful aguti, the hoggish peccary, and the timid deer of the savannah,--have left the parched plains and migrated to the forest or the river. The large maneless puma and the spotted jaguar, following their prey to less arid regions, are now no longer seen in their former hunting-grounds, and the Indian has also disappeared with the stag whom he pursued with his poisoned arrows. In the Siberian Tundras the reindeer and the migratory birds are scared away by winter; here life is banished or suspended by an intolerable aridity. [Illustration: AGUTI.] [Illustration: PECCARY.] Sometimes the ravages of fire complete the image of death on the parched savannah.