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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We Found Ourselves At Midnight Between Some Barren And Rocky
Islands, Which Uprise Like Bastions In The Middle Of The
Sea, and
form the group of the Caracas and Chimanas.* (* There are three of
the Caracas islands and eight of
The Chimanas.) The moon was above
the horizon, and lighted up these cleft rocks which are bare of
vegetation and of fantastic aspect. The sea here forms a sort of
bay, a slight inward curve of the land between Cumana and Cape
Codera. The islets of Picua, Picuita, Caracas, and Boracha, appear
like fragments of the ancient coast, which stretches from Bordones
in the same direction east and west. The gulfs of Mochima and Santa
Fe, which will no doubt one day become frequented ports, lie behind
those little islands. The rents in the land, the fracture and dip
of the strata, all here denote the effects of a great revolution:
possibly that which clove asunder the chain of the primitive
mountains, and separated the mica-schist of Araya and the island of
Margareta from the gneiss of Cape Codera. Several of the islands
are visible at Cumana, from the terraces of the houses, and they
produce, according to the superposition of layers of air more or
less heated, the most singular effects of suspension and mirage.
The height of the rocks does not probably exceed one hundred and
fifty toises; but at night, when lighted by the moon, they seem to
be of a very considerable elevation.
It may appear extraordinary, to find the Caracas Islands so distant
from the city of that name, opposite the coast of the Cumanagotos;
but the denomination of Caracas denoted at the beginning of the
Conquest, not a particular spot, but a tribe of Indians, neighbours
of the Tecs, the Taramaynas, and the Chagaragates.
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