Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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I Was Able To Fix The Longitude With Much
More Precision In My Way To The Rio Negro, And In Returning From That
River.
It is 70 degrees 30 minutes 46 seconds (or 4 degrees 0 minutes
west of the meridian of Cumana).
On the 26th of April we advanced only two or three leagues, and passed
the night on a rock near the Indian plantations or conucos of
Guapasoso. The river losing itself by its inundations in the forests,
and its real banks being unseen, the traveller can venture to land
only where a rock or a small table-land rises above the water. The
granite of those countries, owing to the position of the thin laminae
of black mica, sometimes resembles graphic granite; but most
frequently (and this determines the age of its formation) it passes
into a real gneiss. Its beds, very regularly stratified, run from
south-west to north-east, as in the Cordillera on the shore of
Caracas. The dip of the granite-gneiss is 70 degrees north-west. It is
traversed by an infinite number of veins of quartz, which are
singularly transparent, and three or four, and sometimes fifteen
inches thick. I found no cavity (druse), no crystallized substance,
not even rock-crystal; and no trace of pyrites, or any other metallic
substance. I enter into these particulars on account of the chimerical
ideas that have been spread ever since the sixteenth century, after
the voyages of Berreo and Raleigh,* "on the immense riches of the
great and fine empire of Guiana." (* Raleigh's work bears the high
sounding title of The Discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful
Empire of Guiana, London 1596. See also Raleghi admiranda Descriptio
Regni Guianae, auri abundantissimi, Hondius Noribergae 1599.)
The river Atabapo presents throughout a peculiar aspect; you see
nothing of its real banks formed by flat lands eight or ten feet high;
they are concealed by a row of palms, and small trees with slender
trunks, the roots of which are bathed by the waters. There are many
crocodiles from the point where you quit the Orinoco to the mission of
San Fernando, and their presence indicates that this part of the river
belongs to the Rio Guaviare and not to the Atabapo. In the real bed of
the latter river, above the mission of San Fernando, there are no
crocodiles: we find there some bavas, a great many fresh-water
dolphins, but no manatees. We also seek in vain on these banks for the
thick-nosed tapir, the araguato, or great howling monkey, the zamuro,
or Vultur aura, and the crested pheasant, known by the name of
guacharaca. Enormous water-snakes, in shape resembling the boa, are
unfortunately very common, and are dangerous to Indians who bathe. We
saw them almost from the first day we embarked, swimming by the side
of our canoe; they were at most twelve or fourteen feet long. The
jaguars of the banks of the Atabapo and the Temi are large and well
fed; they are said, however, to be less daring than the jaguars of the
Orinoco.
The night of the 27th was beautiful; dark clouds passed from time to
time over the zenith with extreme rapidity. Not a breath of wind was
felt in the lower strata of the atmosphere; the breeze was at the
height of a thousand toises. I dwell upon this peculiarity; for the
movement we saw was not produced by the counter-currents (from west to
east) which are sometimes thought to be observed in the torrid zone on
the loftiest mountains of the Cordilleras; it was the effect of a real
breeze, an east wind. We left the conucos of Guapasoso at two o'clock;
and continued to ascend the river toward the south, finding it (or
rather that part of its bed which is free from trees) growing more and
more narrow. It began to rain toward sunrise. In these forests, which
are less inhabited by animals than those of the Orinoco, we no longer
heard the howlings of the monkeys. The dolphins, or toninas, sported
by the side of our boat. According to the relation of Mr. Colebrooke,
the Delphinus gangeticus, which is the fresh-water porpoise of the Old
World, in like manner accompanies the boats that go up towards
Benares; but from Benares to the point where the Ganges receives the
salt waters is only two hundred leagues, while from the Atabapo to the
mouth of the Orinoco is more than three hundred and twenty.
About noon we passed the mouth of the little river Ipurichapano on the
east, and afterwards the granitic rock, known by the name of Piedra
del Tigre. Between the fourth and fifth degrees of latitude, a little
to the south of the mountains of Sipapo, we reach the southern
extremity of that chain of cataracts, which I proposed, in a memoir
published in 1800, to call the Chain of Parima. At 4 degrees 20
minutes it stretches from the right bank of the Orinoco toward the
east and east-south-east. The whole of the land extending from the
mountains of the Parima towards the river Amazon, which is traversed
by the Atabapo, the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro, is an immense
plain, covered partly with forests, and partly with grass. Small rocks
rise here and there like castles. We regretted that we had not stopped
to rest near the Piedra del Tigre; for on going up the Atabapo we had
great difficulty to find a spot of dry ground, open and spacious
enough to light a fire, and place our instrument and our hammocks.
On the 28th of April, it rained hard after sunset, and we were afraid
that our collections would be damaged. The poor missionary had his fit
of tertian fever, and besought us to re-embark immediately after
midnight. We passed at day-break the Piedra and the Raudalitos* (* The
rock and little cascades.) of Guarinuma. The rock is on the east bank;
it is a shelf of granite, covered with psora, cladonia, and other
lichens.
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