These flat regions themselves were traversed in many places by rocky ridges of a singularly forbidding aspect.

The whole appearance of the country was dry, stony, sterile.

As a modern writer observes, "the livery of the land is constantly brown or gray; water is scanty; plains and mountains are equally destitute of wood.

When the traveller, after toiling over the rocky mountains that separate the plains looks down from the pass he has won with toil and difficulty upon the country below, his eye wanders unchecked and unrested over an uniform brown expanse losing itself in distance." Still this character, though predominant, is not universal.

Wherever there is water, vegetation springs up.