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To the south this basin-like plain contracts, and rising scarcely perceptibly with a smooth surface, passes through a remarkable level gap in the mountains, forming a true land-strait, and called the Angostura.

This is the zone or land-strait by which, between 12 and 20 degrees of south latitude, the plains of the Amazon communicate with the Pampas of Buenos Ayres. The western bank of this zone is formed by the Andes, between the knot of Porco and Potosi, and that of Huanuco and Pasco.

It then immediately expands into a second basin-formed plain: this again to the south contracts into another land-strait, and expands into a third basin, which, however, falls suddenly in level about forty feet.

Each basin, moreover, is not drained singly; thus, to give the most striking instance, but not the only one, in proceeding southward over the plain of Rancagua, we first find the water flowing northward to and through the northern land-strait; then, without crossing any marked ridge or watershed, we see it flowing south-westward towards the northern one of the two breaches in the western mountainous boundary; and lastly, again without any ridge, it flows towards the southern breach in these same mountains.

The aspect of the country here reminds us, but on a much larger scale, of the plains of Lombardy, which also are only fifty or sixty toises above the level of the ocean; and are directed first from La Brenta to Turin, east and west; and then from Turin to Coni, north and south. This channel is a kind of land-strait.

The interior of Darfur is not more unknown to geographers than the humid, insalubrious forest-land which extends on the north-west of Betoi and the confluence of the Bevara with the Atrato, towards the isthmus of Panama. All that we positively know of it hitherto is that between Cupica and the left bank of the Atrato there is either a land-strait, or a total absence of the Cordillera.

The third slope, running from north to south, is that of the land-strait between the Andes and the chain of Parime. The farms and villages which seem as if situated on shoals, scarcely rise two or three feet above the surface of the water.