pleasure: the leaves ever green, cooling showers. But it holds in such as
are intemperately hot, as [1514]Johannes a Meggen found in Cyprus, others
in Malta, Aupulia, and the [1515]Holy Land, where at some seasons of the
year is nothing but dust, their rivers dried up, the air scorching hot, and
earth inflamed; insomuch that many pilgrims going barefoot for devotion
sake, from Joppa to Jerusalem upon the hot sands, often run mad, or else
quite overwhelmed with sand, _profundis arenis_, as in many parts of
Africa, Arabia Deserta, Bactriana, now Charassan, when the west wind blows
[1516]_Involuti arenis transeuntes necantur_. [1517]Hercules de Saxonia, a
professor in Venice, gives this cause why so many Venetian women are
melancholy, _Quod diu sub sole degant_, they tarry too long in the sun.
Montanus, _consil. 21_, amongst other causes assigns this; Why that Jew his
patient was mad, _Quod tam multum exposuit se calori et frigori_: he
exposed himself so much to heat and cold, and for that reason in Venice,
there is little stirring in those brick paved streets in summer about noon,
they are most part then asleep: as they are likewise in the great Mogol's
countries, and all over the East Indies. At Aden in Arabia, as [1518]
Lodovicus Vertomannus relates in his travels, they keep their markets in
the night, to avoid extremity of heat; and in Ormus, like cattle in a
pasture, people of all sorts lie up to the chin in water all day long. At
Braga in Portugal; Burgos in Castile; Messina in Sicily, all over Spain and
Italy, their streets are most part narrow, to avoid the sunbeams. The Turks
wear great turbans _ad fugandos solis radios_, to refract the sunbeams; and
much inconvenience that hot air of Bantam in Java yields to our men, that
sojourn there for traffic; where it is so hot, [1519]"that they that are
sick of the pox, lie commonly bleaching in the sun, to dry up their sores."
Such a complaint I read of those isles of Cape Verde, fourteen degrees from
the Equator, they do _male audire_: [1520]One calls them the unhealthiest
clime of the world, for fluxes, fevers, frenzies, calentures, which
commonly seize on seafaring men that touch at them, and all by reason of a