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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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.
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