Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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These are rocks really pierced; natural galleries, which
run through a solitary mountain:
Such are the Hohleberg of
Muggendorf, and the famous cavern called Dantoe by the Ottomite
Indians, and the Bridge of the Mother of God, by the Mexican
Spaniards. It is difficult to decide respecting the origin of these
channels, which sometimes serve as beds for subterranean rivers.
Are these pierced rocks hollowed out by the impulse of a current?
or should we rather admit that one of the openings of the cavern is
owing to a falling down of the earth subsequent to its original
formation; to a change in the external form of the mountain, for
instance, to a new valley opened on its flank? A third form of
caverns, and the most common of the whole, exhibits a succession of
cavities, placed nearly on the same level, running in the same
direction, and communicating with each other by passages of greater
or less breadth.
To these differences of general form are added other circumstances
not less remarkable. It often happens, that grottoes of little
space have extremely wide openings; whilst we have to creep under
very low vaults, in order to penetrate into the deepest and most
spacious caverns. The passages which unite partial grottoes, are
generally horizontal. I have seen some, however, which resemble
funnels or wells, and which may be attributed to the escape of some
elastic fluid through a mass before being hardened. When rivers
issue from grottoes, they form only a single, horizontal,
continuous channel, the dilatations of which are almost
imperceptible; as in the Cueva del Guacharo we have just described,
and the cavern of San Felipe, near Tehuilotepec in the western
Cordilleras of Mexico. The sudden disappearance* of the river (* In
the night of the 16th April, 1802.), which took its rise from this
last cavern, has impoverished a district in which farmers and
miners equally require water for refreshing the soil and for
working hydraulic machinery.
Considering the variety of structure exhibited by grottoes in both
hemispheres, we cannot but refer their formation to causes totally
different. When we speak of the origin of caverns we must choose
between two systems of natural philosophy: one of these systems
attributes every thing to instantaneous and violent commotions (for
example, to the elastic force of vapours, and to the heavings
occasioned by volcanoes); while the other rests on the operation of
small powers, which produce effects almost insensibly by
progressive action. Those who love to indulge in geological
hypotheses must not, however, forget the horizontality so often
remarked amidst gypseous and calcareous mountains, in the position
of grottoes communicating with each other by passages. This almost
perfect horizontality, this gentle and uniform slope, appears to be
the result of a long abode of the waters, which enlarge by erosion
clefts already existing, and carry off the softer parts the more
easily, as clay or muriate of soda is found mixed with the gypsum
and fetid limestone. These effects are the same, whether the
caverns form one long and continued range, or several of these
ranges lie one over another, as happens almost exclusively in
gypseous mountains.
That which in shelly or Neptunean rocks is caused by the action of
the waters, appears sometimes to be in the volcanic rocks the
effect of gaseous emanations* acting in the direction where they
find the least resistance. (* At Vesuvius, the Duke de la Torre
showed me, in 1805, in currents of recent lava, cavities extending
in the direction of the current, six or seven feet long and three
feet high. These little volcanic caverns were lined with specular
iron, which cannot be called oligiste iron, since M. Gay-Lussac's
last experiments on the oxides of iron.) When melted matter moves
on a very gentle slope, the great axis of the cavity formed by the
elastic fluids is nearly horizontal, or parallel to the plane on
which the movement of transition takes place. A similar
disengagement of vapours, joined to the elastic force of the gases,
which penetrate strata softened and raised up, appears sometimes to
have given great extent to the caverns found in trachytes or
trappean porphyries. These porphyritic caverns, in the Cordilleras
of Quito and Peru, bear the Indian name of Machays.* (* Machay is a
word of the Quichua language, commonly called by the Spaniards the
Incas' language. Callancamachay means a cavern as large as a house,
a cavern that serves as a tambo or caravansarai.) They are in
general of little depth. They are lined with sulphur, and differ by
the enormous size of their openings from those observed in volcanic
tufas* in Italy, at Teneriffe, and in the Andes. (*Sometimes fire
acts like water in carrying off masses, and thus the cavities may
be caused by an igneous, though more frequently by an aqueous
erosion or solution.) It is by connecting in the mind the
primitive, secondary, and volcanic rocks, and distinguishing
between the oxidated crust of the globe, and the interior nucleus,
composed perhaps of metallic and inflammable substances, that we
may account for the existence of grottoes everywhere. They act in
the economy of nature as vast reservoirs of water and of elastic
fluids.
The gypseous caverns glitter with crystallized selenites. Vitreous
crystallized plates of brown and yellow stand out on a striated
ground composed of layers of alabaster and fetid limestone. The
calcareous grottoes have a more uniform tint. They are more
beautiful, and richer in stalactites, in proportion as they are
narrower, and the circulation of air is less free. By being
spacious, and accessible to air, the cavern of Caripe is almost
destitute of those incrustations, the imitative forms of which are
in other countries objects of popular curiosity. I also sought in
vain for subterranean plants, those cryptogamia of the family of
the Usneaceae, which we sometimes find fixed on the stalactites,
like ivy on walls, when we penetrate for the first time into a
lateral grotto.* (* Lichen tophicola was discovered when the
beautiful cavern of Rosenmuller in Franconia was first opened.
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