Beyond, the monotonous plain of the ferns, bathed in light, stretches
away as far as the eye can reach. Their green fans expand beneath the
sun which colors, but does not cause them to fade. Upon the horizon a
few scattered trees lift their slender columns. You see now and then
the silhouette of a herdsman on his stilts, inert and standing like a
sick heron. Wild horses are grazing half hid in the herbage. As the
train passes, they abruptly lift their great startled eyes and stand
motionless, uneasy at the noise that has troubled their solitude.
Man does not fare well here--he dies or degenerates; but it is the
country of animals, and especially of plants. They abound in this
desert, free, certain of living. Our pretty, cut-up valleys are but
poor things alongside of these immense spaces, leagues upon leagues
of marshy or dry vegetation, a level country, where nature, elsewhere
troubled and tortured by men, still vegetates, as in primeval days,
with a calm equal to its grandeur. The sun needs these savannas in
order properly to spread out its light; from the rising exhalation,
you feel that the whole plain is fermenting under its force; and the
eyes, filled by the limitless horizon, divine the secret labor by
which this ocean of rank verdure renews and nourishes itself.
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