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 Porpoises (Toninas) Ploughed The River
In Long Files.
The shore was covered with fishing-birds.
Some of these
perched on the floating wood as it passed down the river, and
surprised the fish that preferred the middle of the stream. Our canoe
was aground several times during the morning. These shocks are
sufficiently violent to split a light bark. We struck on the points of
several large trees, which remain for years in an oblique position,
sunk in the mud. These trees descend from Sarare, at the period of
great inundations, and they so fill the bed of the river, that canoes
in going up find it difficult sometimes to make their way over the
shoals, or wherever there are eddies. We reached a spot near the
island of Carizales, where we saw trunks of the locust-tree, of an
enormous size, above the surface of the water. They were covered with
a species of plotus, nearly resembling the anhinga, or white bellied
darter. These birds perch in files, like pheasants and parrakas, and
they remain for hours entirely motionless, with their beaks raised
toward the sky.
Below the island of Carizales we observed a diminution of the waters
of the river, at which we were the more surprised, as, after the
bifurcation at la Boca de Arichuna, there is no branch, no natural
drain, which takes away water from the Apure. The loss is solely the
effect of evaporation, and of filtration on a sandy and wet shore.
Some idea of the magnitude of these effects may be formed, from the
fact that we found the heat of the dry sands, at different hours of
the day, from 36 to 52 degrees, and that of sands covered with three
or four inches of water 32 degrees.
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