[Footnote A:  Savanna was a Haytian word spelt and pronounced by Spaniards.  It is a plain of grass, affording pasturage in the rainy season; but a few shrubs also grow upon it. Pampas are vast plains without vegetation except during three months of the rainy season, when they yield fine grass.  The word is Peruvian; was originally applied to the plains at the mouth of the La Plata.  But the plains of Guiana and tropical America, which the Spaniards called Llanos, are also pampas.  The Hungarian pasture-lands, called Puszta, are savannas.  A Steppe is properly a vast extent of country, slightly rolling, without woods, but not without large plants and herbs.  In Russia there are sometimes thickets eight or ten feet high.  The salt deserts in Russia are not called steppes, but Solniye.  Pampas and deserts are found alternating with steppes.  A Desert may have a sparing vegetation, and so differ from pampas:  if it has any plants, they are scrubby and fibrous, with few leaves, and of a grayish color, and so it differs from steppes and savannas.  But there are rocky and gravelly, sandy and salt deserts:  gravelly, for instance, in Asia Minor, principally in the district known to the ancients as the [Greek:  katakekaumegae].  A Heath is a level covered with the plants to which that name has been applied.  Finally, a Prairie differs from a savanna only in being under a zone where the seasons are not marked as wet and dry, but where the herbage corresponds to a variable moisture.]

The words crete, pic, and montagne are sometimes applied to the peaks and ridges of the island, but the word morne, which is a Creole corruption of montagne, is in common use to designate all the elevated land, the extended ridges which serve as water-sheds for the torrents of the rainy season, as well as the isolated hillocks, clothed in wood, which look like huge hay-cocks,—­those, for instance, which rise in the rear of Cap Haytien.  The aspect of the higher hills in the interior might mislead an etymologist to derive the word morne from the French adjective which means gloomy, they are so marked by the ravages of the hurricane and earthquake, so ploughed up into decrepit features by the rains, the pitiless vertical heat, the fires, and the landslides.  The soft rock cannot preserve its outlines beneath all these influences; its thin covering of soil is carried off to make the river-silt, and then it crumbles away beneath the weather.  Great ruts are scored through the forests where the rock has let whole acres of trees and rubbish slip; they sometimes cover the negro-cabins and the coffee-walks below.  These mountains are capricious and disordered masses of grayish stone; there are no sustained lines which sweep upward from the green plantations and cut sharply across the sky, no unchangeable walls of cool shadow, no delicate curves, as in other hills, where the symmetry itself seems to protect the material from the wear and tear of the atmosphere.  The mornes are decaying hills; they look as if they emerged first from the ocean and were the oldest parts of the earth, not merely weather-beaten, but profligately used up with a too tropical career, which deprives their age of all grandeur:  they bewilder and depress.