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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It Would Have Been Perhaps As Prudent To Have Continued Our
Course.
The old charts are filled with rocks, some of which really
exist, though most of them are merely the offspring of those
optical illusions which are more frequent at sea than in inland
places.
As we approached the supposed Maal-stroom, we observed no
other motion in the waters than the effect of a current which bore
to the north-west, and which hindered us from diminishing our
latitude as much as we wished. The force of this current augments
as we approach the new continent; it is modified by the
configuration of the coasts of Brazil and Guiana, and not by the
waters of the Orinoco and the Amazon, as some have supposed.
From the time we entered the torrid zone, we were never weary of
admiring, at night, the beauty of the southern sky, which, as we
advanced to the south, opened new constellations to our view. We
feel an indescribable sensation when, on approaching the equator,
and particularly on passing from one hemisphere to the other, we
see those stars, which we have contemplated from our infancy,
progressively sink, and finally disappear. Nothing awakens in the
traveller a livelier remembrance of the immense distance by which
he is separated from his country, than the aspect of an unknown
firmament. The grouping of the stars of the first magnitude, some
scattered nebulae, rivalling in splendour the milky way, and tracts
of space remarkable for their extreme blackness, give a peculiar
physiognomy to the southern sky.
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