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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The People Sometimes Mix The Incienso Of The Silla With
The Flowers Of The Pevetera, Another Composite Plant, The Smell Of
Which Resembles That Of The Heliotropium Of Peru.
The pevetera does
not, however, grow on the mountains so high as the zone of the
befarias; it vegetates in the valley of Chacao, and the ladies of
Caracas prepare from it an extremely pleasant odoriferous water.
We spent a long time in examining the fine resinous and fragrant
plants of the Pejual. The sky became more and more cloudy, and the
thermometer sank below 11 degrees, a temperature at which, in this
zone, people begin to suffer from the cold. Quitting the little
thicket of alpine plants, we found ourselves again in a savannah.
We climbed over a part of the western dome, in order to descend
into the hollow of the Silla, a valley which separates the two
summits of the mountain. We there had great difficulties to
overcome, occasioned by the force of the vegetation. A botanist
would not readily guess that the thick wood covering this valley is
formed by the assemblage of a plant of the musaceous family.*
(*Scitamineous plants, or family of the plantains.) It is probably
a maranta, or a heliconia; its leaves are large and shining; it
reaches the height of fourteen or fifteen feet, and its succulent
stalks grow near one another like the stems of the reeds found in
the humid regions of the south of Europe.* (* Arundo donax.) We
were obliged to cut our way through this forest. The negroes walked
before with their cutlasses or machetes. The people confound this
alpine scitamineous plant with the arborescent gramina, under the
name of carice. We saw neither its fruit nor flowers. We are
surprised to meet with a monocotyledonous family, believed to be
exclusively found in the hot and low regions of the tropics, at
eleven hundred toises of elevation; much higher than the
andromedas, the thibaudias, and the rhododendron of the
Cordilleras.* (* Befaria.) In a chain of mountains no less
elevated, and more northern (the Blue Mountains of Jamaica), the
Heliconia of the parrots and the bihai, rather grow in the alpine
shaded situations.* (* Heliconia psittacorum, and H. bihai. These
two heliconias are very common in the plains of Terra Firma.)
Wandering in this thick wood of musaceae or arborescent plants, we
constantly directed our course towards the eastern peak, which we
perceived from time to time through an opening. On a sudden we
found ourselves enveloped in a thick mist; the compass alone could
guide us; but in advancing northward we were in danger at every
step of finding ourselves on the brink of that enormous wall of
rocks, which descends almost perpendicularly to the depth of six
thousand feet towards the sea. We were obliged to halt. Surrounded
by clouds sweeping the ground, we began to doubt whether we should
reach the eastern peak before night. Happily, the negroes who
carried our water and provisions, rejoined us, and we resolved to
take some refreshment. Our repast did not last long. Possibly the
Capuchin father had not thought of the great number of persons who
accompanied us, or perhaps the slaves had made free with our
provisions on the way; be that as it may, we found nothing but
olives, and scarcely any bread. Horace, in his retreat at Tibur,
never boasted of a repast more light and frugal; but olives, which
might have afforded a satisfactory meal to a poet, devoted to
study, and leading a sedentary life, appeared an aliment by no
means sufficiently substantial for travellers climbing mountains.
We had watched the greater part of the night, and we walked for
nine hours without finding a single spring. Our guides were
discouraged; they wished to go back, and we had great difficulty in
preventing them.
In the midst of the mist I made trial of the electrometer of Volta,
armed with a smoking match. Though very near a thick wood of
heliconias, I obtained very sensible signs of atmospheric
electricity. It often varied from positive to negative, its
intensity changing every instant. These variations, and the
conflict of several small currents of air, which divided the mist,
and transformed it into clouds, the borders of which were visible,
appeared to me infallible prognostics of a change in the weather.
It was only two o'clock in the afternoon; we entertained some hope
of reaching the eastern summit of the Silla before sunset, and of
re-descending into the valley separating the two peaks, intending
there to pass the night, to light a great fire, and to make our
negroes construct a hut with the leaves of the heliconia. We sent
off half of our servants with orders to hasten the next morning to
meet us, not with olives, but with a supply of salt beef.
We had scarcely made these arrangements when the east wind began to
blow violently from the sea. The thermometer rose to 12.5 degrees.
It was no doubt an ascending wind, which, by heightening the
temperature, dissolved the vapours. In less than two minutes the
clouds dispersed, and the two domes of the Silla appeared to us
singularly near. We opened the barometer in the lowest part of the
hollow that separates the two summits, near a little pool of very
muddy water. Here, as in the West India Islands, marshy plains are
found at great elevations; not because the woody mountains attract
the clouds, but because they condense the vapours by the effect of
nocturnal refrigeration, occasioned by the radiation of heat from
the ground, and from the parenchyma of the leaves. The mercury was
at 21 inches 5.7 lines. We shaped our course direct to the eastern
summit. The obstruction caused by the vegetation gradually
diminished; it was, however, necessary to cut down some heliconias;
but these arborescent plants were not now very thick or high. The
peaks of the Silla themselves, as we have several times mentioned,
are covered only with gramina and small shrubs of befaria.
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