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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The Landscape Of The Tropics In The Low Regions Of
The Continents Has A Peculiar Physiognomy, Something Of Greatness And
Repose, Which It Preserves Even Where One Of The Elements Is
Struggling With Invincible Obstacles.
Near the equator, hurricanes and
tempests belong to islands only, to deserts destitute of plants, and
to those spots where parts of the atmosphere repose upon surfaces from
which the radiation of heat is very unequal.
The mountain of Manimi forms the eastern limit of a plain which
furnishes for the history of vegetation, that is, for its progressive
development in bare and desert places, the same phenomena which we
have described above in speaking of the raudal of Atures. During the
rainy season, the waters heap vegetable earth upon the granitic rock,
the bare shelves of which extend horizontally. These islands of mould,
decorated with beautiful and odoriferous plants, resemble the blocks
of granite covered with flowers, which the inhabitants of the Alps
call gardens or courtils, and which pierce the glaciers of
Switzerland.
In a place where we had bathed the day before, at the foot of the rock
of Manimi, the Indians killed a serpent seven feet and a half long.
The Macos called it a camudu. Its back displayed, upon a yellow
ground, transverse bands, partly black, and partly inclining to a
brown green: under the belly the bands were blue, and united in
rhombic spots. This animal, which is not venomous, is said by the
natives to attain more than fifteen feet in length. I thought at
first, that the camudu was a boa; but I saw with surprise, that the
scales beneath the tail were divided into two rows. It was therefore a
viper (coluber); perhaps a python of the New Continent: I say perhaps,
for great naturalists appear to admit that all the pythons belong to
the Old, and all the boas to the New World. As the boa of Pliny was a
serpent of Africa and of the south of Europe, it would have been well
if the boas of America had been named pythons, and the pythons of
India been called boas. The first notions of an enormous reptile
capable of seizing man, and even the great quadrupeds, came to us from
India and the coast of Guinea. However indifferent names may be, we
can scarcely admit the idea, that the hemisphere in which Virgil
described the agonies of Laocoon (a fable which the Greeks of Asia
borrowed from much more southern nations) does not possess the
boa-constrictor. I will not augment the confusion of zoological
nomenclature by proposing new changes, and shall confine myself to
observing that at least the missionaries and the latinized Indians of
the missions, if not the planters of Guiana, clearly distinguish the
traga-venados (real boas, with simple anal plates) from the culebras
de agua, or water-snakes, like the camudu (pythons with double anal
scales). The traga-venados have no transverse bands on the back, but a
chain of rhombic or hexagonal spots.
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