The Apennines, another memorable chain, also beginning at the Gulf of Genoa, strike direct through the heart of Italy, and end in Calabria--a line of eight hundred miles. Dalmatia and Albania are _knots_ of hills; Pindus, and the mountains of Northern Greece, are bold offsets from the Eastern Alps.
Among those wonderful arrangements, the table-lands are perhaps the most wonderful. In the midst of countries where everything seemed to tend to the mountainous form, we find vast plains raised almost to a mountainous height, yet retaining their level. This form peculiarly occurs in latitudes of high temperature. The centre of Spain is a table-land of more than ninety-two thousand square miles--one half of the area of Spain.
The country between the two ranges of the Atlas is a table-land, exhibiting the richest products, and possessing the finest climate, of Northern Africa. Equatorial Africa is one immense table-land, of which, however, we can only conjecture the advantages. Whether from the difficulty of approach, the distance, or the diversion of the current of adventure to other quarters of the world, this chief portion of the African continent continues almost unknown to Europeans. The central region is a blank in our maps, but occasional tales reach us of the plenty, the pomp, and even of the civilisation and industry of the table-land. The centre of India is a table-land, possessing, in that region of fire and fever, a bracing air, and a productive, though rugged soil.
The table-lands of Asia partake of the characteristic magnitude which belongs to that mighty quarter of the globe. That of Persia has an area of more than a million and a half of square miles. That of Tibet has an area of six times the extent, with a still greater elevation above the level of the sea--its general altitude being about the height of Mont Blanc, and, in some instances, two thousand feet higher. The mean altitude of the Persian plateau is not above four thousand feet.
We have adverted to those formations of vast elevated plains in the midst of countries necessarily exposed to extreme heat, as one of the remarkable instances of providential contrivance, if we must use that familiar word in such mighty instances of design, for the comfort of animated being. We thus find, in the latitudes exposed to the fiercest heat of the sun, a provision for a temperature consistent with the health, activity, and industry of man. Persia, which, if on the level of the sea, would be a furnace, is thus reduced to comparative coolness; Tibet, which would be a boundless plain of fiery sand, exhibits that sternness of climate which makes the northern Asiatic bold, healthy, and hardy.