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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It
May Be Followed For A Length Of Two Hundred And Fifty Leagues; But It
Is Less A Chain, Than A Collection Of Granitic Mountains, Separated By
Small Plains, Without Being Everywhere Disposed In Lines.
The group of
the mountains of Parime narrows considerably between the sources of
the Orinoco and the mountains of Demerara, in the Sierras of
Quimiropaca and Pacaraimo, which divide the waters between the Carony
and the Rio Parime, or Rio de Aguas Blancas.
This is the scene of the
expeditions which were undertaken in search of El Dorado, and the
great city of Manoa, the Timbuctoo of the New Continent. The
Cordillera of Parime does not join the Andes of New Grenada, but is
separated from them by a space eighty leagues broad. If we suppose it
to have been destroyed in this space by some great revolution of the
globe (which is scarcely probable) we must admit that it anciently
branched off from the Andes between Santa Fe de Bogota and Pamplona.
This remark serves to fix more easily in the memory of the reader the
geographical position of a Cordillera till now very imperfectly known.
A third chain of mountains unites in 16 and 18 degrees south latitude
(by Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the Serranias of Aguapehy, and the famous
Campos dos Parecis) the Andes of Peru, to the mountains of Brazil. It
is the Cordillera of Chiquitos which widens in the Capitania de Minas
Geraes, and divides the rivers flowing into the Amazon from those of
the Rio de la Plata,* (* There is only a portage or carrying-place of
5322 bracas between the Guapore (a branch of the Marmore and of the
Madeira), and the Rio Aguapehy (a branch of the Jaura and of the
Paraguay).) not only in the interior of the country, in the meridian
of Villa Boa, but also at a few leagues from the coast, between Rio
Janeiro and Bahia.* (* The Cordillera of Chiquitos and of Brazil
stretches toward the south-east, in the government of the Rio Grande,
beyond the latitude of 30 degrees south.)
These three transverse chains, or rather these three groups of
mountains stretching from west to east, within the limits of the
torrid zone, are separated by tracts entirely level, the plains of
Caracas, or of the Lower Orinoco; the plains of the Amazon and the Rio
Negro; and the plains of Buenos Ayres, or of La Plata.
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