text:  The uniform appearance which the Llanos exhibit the extreme rarity of any habitations the fatigues of a journey under a burning sun and in an atmosphere perpetually clouded with dust the prospect of a round girdle of an horizon which appears constantly to recede before the traveller the isolated stems of the palm-tree all precisely of the same form and which he despairs to reach because he confounds them with other seemingly identical trunks which appear in the distant parts of the horizon: all these causes combine to make these steppes appear even more vast than they really are