Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 100 of 779 - First - Home
The Considerable Mass Of A Mountain,
Rising In The Midst Of The Atlantic, Is Also An Obstacle To The
Clouds, Which Are Driven Out To Sea By The Winds.
On entering the streets of Santa Cruz, we felt a suffocating heat,
though the thermometer was not above twenty-five degrees.
Those who
have for a long time inhaled the air of the sea suffer every time
they land; not because this air contains more oxygen than the air
on shore, as has been erroneously supposed, but because it is less
charged with those gaseous combinations, which the animal and
vegetable substances, and the mud resulting from their
decomposition, pour into the atmosphere. Miasms that escape
chemical analysis have a powerful effect on our organs, especially
when they have not for a long while been exposed to the same kind
of irritation.
Santa Cruz, the Anaza of the Guanches, is a neat town, with a
population of 8000 souls. I was not struck with the vast number of
monks and secular ecclesiastics, which travellers have thought
themselves bound to find in every country under the Spanish
government; nor shall I stop to enter into the description of the
churches; the library of the Dominicans, which contains scarcely a
few hundred volumes; the mole, where the inhabitants assemble to
inhale the freshness of the evening breeze; or the famed monument
of Carrara marble, thirty feet high, dedicated to Our Lady of
Candelaria, in memory of the miraculous appearance of the Virgin,
in 1392, at Chimisay, near Guimar.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 100 of 779
Words from 27087 to 27341
of 211363
