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Tamoskaro Directory 01
Page 06
We travelled along that great table-land, occasionally seeing a herd of llamas stampede away at the approach of the train, now and then observing circular stone walls erected by shepherds as shelters. A gable-roofed hut was occasionally seen. Picturesque natives in their _ponchos_ and red or yellow scarves gazed, astonished, at the train throbbing along slowly upon the steep gradient of that elevated barren country. The cold seemed intense after the tropical heat of Lima. It was snowing hard. In the daytime I generally travelled seated in front of the engine, in order to have a better view of the landscape. In the train everybody suffered from _soroche_ or mountain-sickness, which attacked most people when brought up quickly by the railway from the sea to such high elevations. I was driven away from the front of the engine by the cold rain and sleet beating with great force into my face, and obscuring the landscape to such an extent that I could see nothing at all.
Memling (1425?-1495?), one of the greatest of the school, is another man about whose life little is known. He was probably associated with Van der Weyden in some way. His art is founded on the Van Eyck school, and is remarkable for sincerity, purity, and frankness of attitude. As a religious painter, he was perhaps beyond all his contemporaries in tenderness and pathos. In portraiture he was exceedingly strong in characterization, and in his figures very graceful. His flesh painting was excellent, but in textures or landscape work he was not remarkable. His best followers were Van der Meire (1427?-1474?) and Gheeraert David (1450?-1523). The latter was famous for the fine, broad landscapes in the backgrounds of his pictures, said, however, by critics to have been painted by Joachim Patinir. He was realistically horrible in many subjects, and though a close recorder of detail he was much broader than any of his predecessors.
Important, too, is the story of supposed Norse sea-rovers hither, derived from certain Icelandic manuscripts of the fourteenth century. It is a pleasing narrative, that of Lief Ericson's sail in 1000-1001 to Helluland, Markland, and at last to Vineland, and of the subsequent tours by Thorwald Ericson in 1002, Thorfinn Karlsefne, 1007-1009, and of Helge and Finnborge in 1011, to points still farther away. Such voyages probably occurred. As is well known, Helluland has been interpreted to be Newfoundland; Markland, Nova Scotia; and Vineland, the country bordering Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, R. I. These identifications are possibly correct, and even if they are mistaken, Vineland may still have been somewhere upon the coast of what is now the United States.
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