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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Twice Confined In Its Course, It
Turbulently Breaks On The Rocks, That Form Steps And Transverse Dykes.
Nothing Can Be Grander Than The Aspect Of This Spot.
Neither the fall
of the Tequendama, near Santa Fe de Bogota, nor the magnificent scenes
of the Cordilleras, could weaken the impression produced upon my mind
by the first view of the rapids of Atures and of Maypures.
When the
spectator is so stationed that the eye can at once take in the long
succession of cataracts, the immense sheet of foam and vapours
illumined by the rays of the setting sun, the whole river seems as it
were suspended over its bed.
Scenes so astonishing must for ages have fixed the attention of the
inhabitants of the New World. When Diego de Todaz, Alfonzo de Herrera,
and the intrepid Raleigh, anchored at the mouth of the Orinoco, they
were informed by the Indians of the Great Cataracts, which they
themselves had never visited, and which they even confounded with
cascades farther to the east. Whatever obstacles the force of
vegetation under the torrid zone may throw in the way of intercourse
among nations, all that relates to the course of great rivers acquires
a celebrity which extends to vast distances. The Orinoco, the Amazon,
and the Uruguay, traverse, like inland arms of seas, in different
directions, a land covered with forests, and inhabited by tribes, part
of whom are cannibals. It is not yet two hundred years since
civilization and the light of a more humane religion have pursued
their way along the banks of these ancient canals traced by the hand
of nature; long, however, before the introduction of agriculture,
before communications for the purposes of barter were established
among these scattered and often hostile tribes, the knowledge of
extraordinary phenomena, of falls of water, of volcanic fires, and of
snows resisting all the ardent heat of summer, was propagated by a
thousand fortuitous circumstances. Three hundred leagues from the
coast, in the centre of South America, among nations whose excursions
do not extend to three days' journey, we find an idea of the ocean,
and words that denote a mass of salt water extending as far as the eye
can discern. Various events, which repeatedly occur in savage life,
contribute to enlarge these conceptions. In consequence of the petty
wars between neighbouring tribes, a prisoner is brought into a strange
country, and treated as a poito or mero, that is to say, as a slave.
After being often sold, he is dragged to new wars, escapes, and
returns home; he relates what he has seen, and what he has heard from
those whose tongue he has been compelled to learn. As on discovering a
coast, we hear of great inland animals, so, on entering the valley of
a vast river, we are surprised to find that savages, who are strangers
to navigation, have acquired a knowledge of distant things. In the
infant state of society, the exchange of ideas precedes, to a certain
point, the exchange of productions.
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