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Though the climate is undeniably a "hot" one, the heat, tempered by alternating land and sea breezes, is seldom oppressive except just before rain, and the thermometer never attains anything approaching those torrid temperatures which are registered in India, Japan, the United States, and other parts of the temperate zones.
Depressed and unnerved, in the most trying season of the year, Hawthorne went in the latter part of August to visit Franklin Pierce at Concord, New Hampshire; but there a severe torrid wave came on, so that Pierce advised him to go at once to the Isles of Shoals, promising to follow in a few days, if his numerous engagements would permit him.
The April sun, hot as a torrid July noon in northern lands, discovered the sleeper and stared into his upturned face. He flung his arm across his eyes and slept on. Shadows fell and lengthened; the afternoon passed, and still he slept. Mounted couriers riding at a dead gallop, passed over the road, toward Tanis.
Above Aosta are the sources of the river Po, one of the chief of these being the Dora Baltea, in a deep gorge half-hid by chestnut-trees. It is twenty miles from the lake to the river twenty miles of wild mountain incline twenty miles from Switzerland to Italy, from the eternal snows and faint-colored flowers of the frigid zone, to the dust, and glare of the torrid.
We did not find one indigenous rose-tree in all South America, notwithstanding the analogy existing between the climates of the high mountains of the torrid zone and the climate of our temperate zone. It appears that this charming shrub is wanting in all the southern hemisphere, within and beyond the tropics.
He alleged, as if something of the sort were necessary, the example of a famous Southwestern editor who spent all his summers in a New York hotel as the most luxurious retreat on the continent, consulting the weather forecasts, and running off on torrid days to the mountains or the sea, and then hurrying back at the promise of cooler weather.
The vegetable mould, the principal source of the nutrition of plants, is everywhere extremely thin. It is scarcely augmented by the fall of the leaves, which, in the forests of the torrid zone, is less periodically regular than in temperate climates.
That his light at last went out in darkness that the world he discovered brought nothing to Spain but disappointment and Dead Sea ashes that he dragged out a miserable old age in rotten and unseaworthy ships, lying ill in the torrid heats of the West Indies, racked with excruciating pain, and in absolute penury and want all this but adds point to a life so full of paradox that we may almost pardon him for believing in miracles.
About the end of April, M. Bonpland and myself, having completed the observations we proposed to make at the northern extremity of the torrid zone, were on the point of proceeding to Vera Cruz with the squadron of Admiral Ariztizabal; but being misled by false intelligence respecting the expedition of Captain Baudin, we were induced to relinquish the project of passing through Mexico on our way to the Philippine Islands.
The creaking cordage, the straining engine, the plunging ship, the wild waste of tumbling billows, everyone apparently racing to where our tossing bark was struggling to maintain herself, all had an entrancing interest for me, and I tried to recall Byron's sublime apostrophe to the ocean: Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Classes itself in tempest: in all time, Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving boundless, endless, and sublime The image of eternity the throne Of the invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obey thee: thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone,
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