in their streets. [1512]Gordonius will have every
man take notice of it: “Note this”
(saith he) “that in hot countries it is far
more familiar than in cold.” Although this
we have now said be not continually so, for as [1513]Acosta
truly saith, under the Equator itself, is a most temperate
habitation, wholesome air, a paradise of 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 hot distemperature of the air.
The hardiest men are offended with this heat, and
stiffest clowns cannot resist it, as Constantine affirms,
Agricult. l. 2. c. 45. They that are naturally
born in such air, may not [1521]endure it, as Niger
records of some part of Mesopotamia, now called Diarbecha:
Quibusdam in locis saevienti aestui adeo subjecta
est, ut pleraque animalia fervore solis et coeli extinguantur,