If We Wished To Take The Least Object Out Of A Trunk, Or To Use An Instrument, It Was Necessary To Row Ashore And Land.

To these inconveniences were joined the torment of the mosquitos which swarmed under the toldo, and the heat radiated from the leaves of the palm-trees, the upper surface of which was continually exposed to the solar rays.

We attempted every instant, but always without success, to amend our situation. While one of us hid himself under a sheet to ward off the insects, the other insisted on having green wood lighted beneath the toldo, in the hope of driving away the mosquitos by the smoke. The painful sensations of the eyes, and the increase of heat, already stifling, rendered both these contrivances alike impracticable. With some gaiety of temper, with feelings of mutual good-will, and with a vivid taste for the majestic grandeur of these vast valleys of rivers, travellers easily support evils that become habitual.

Our Indians showed us, on the right bank of the river, the place which was formerly the site of the Mission of Pararuma, founded by the Jesuits about the year 1733. The mortality occasioned by the smallpox among the Salive Indians was the principal cause of the dissolution of the mission. The few inhabitants who survived this cruel epidemic, removed to the village of Carichana. It was at Pararuma, that, according to the testimony of Father Roman, hail was seen to fall during a great storm, about the middle of the last century. This is almost the only instance of it I know in a plain that is nearly on a level with the sea; for hail falls generally, between the tropics, only at three hundred toises of elevation. If it form at an equal height over plains and table-lands, we must suppose that it melts as it falls, in passing through the lowest strata of the atmosphere, the mean temperature of which is from 27.5 to 24 degrees of the centigrade thermometer. I acknowledge it is very difficult to explain, in the present state of meteorology, why it hails at Philadelphia, at Rome, and at Montpelier, during the hottest months, the mean temperature of which attains 25 or 26 degrees; while the same phenomenon is not observed at Cumana, at La Guayra, and in general, in the equatorial plains. In the United States, and in the south of Europe, the heat of the plains (from 40 to 43 degrees latitude) is nearly the same as within the tropics; and according to my researches the decrement of caloric equally varies but little. If then the absence of hail within the torrid zone, at the level of the sea, be produced by the melting of the hailstones in crossing the lower strata of the air, we must suppose that these hail-stones, at the moment of their formation, are larger in the temperate than in the torrid zone. We yet know so little of the conditions under which water congeals in a stormy cloud in our climates, that we cannot judge whether the same conditions be fulfilled on the equator above the plains.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 170 of 406
Words from 88143 to 88669 of 211397