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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All These Observers Compared The Phenomenon To
Brilliant Fireworks; And It Lasted From Three Till Six In The
Morning.
Some of the monks had marked the day in their rituals;
others had noted it by the proximate festivals of the Church.
Unfortunately, none of them could recollect the direction of the
meteors, or their apparent height.
From the position of the
mountains and thick forests which surround the Missions of the
Cataracts and the little village of Maroa, I presume that the
bolides were still visible at 20 degrees above the horizon. On my
arrival at the southern extremity of Spanish Guiana, at the little
fort of San Carlos, I found some Portuguese, who had gone up the
Rio Negro from the Mission of St. Joseph of the Maravitans. They
assured me that in that part of Brazil the phenomenon had been
perceived at least as far as San Gabriel das Cachoeiras,
consequently as far as the equator itself.* (* A little to the
north-west of San Antonio de Castanheiro. I did not meet with any
persons who had observed this meteor, at Santa Fe de Bogota, at
Popayan, or in the southern hemisphere, at Quito and Peru. Perhaps
the state of the atmosphere, so changeable in these western regions,
prevented observation.)
I was forcibly struck by the immense height which these bolides
must have attained, to have rendered them visible simultaneously at
Cumana, and on the frontiers of Brazil, in a line of two hundred
and thirty leagues in length.
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