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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We Stopped Some Time At The Port Of Encaramada, Which Is A Sort Of
Embarcadero, A Place Where Boats Assemble.
A rock of forty or fifty
feet high forms the shore.
It is composed of blocks of granite, heaped
one upon another, as at the Schneeberg in Franconia, and in almost all
the granitic mountains of Europe. Some of these detached masses have a
spheroidal form; they are not balls with concentric layers, but merely
rounded blocks, nuclei separated from their envelopes by the effect of
decomposition. This granite is of a greyish lead-colour, often black,
as if covered with oxide of manganese; but this colour does not
penetrate one fifth of a line into the rock, which is of a reddish
white colour within, coarse-grained, and destitute of hornblende.
The Indian names of the Mission of San Luis del Encaramada, are Guaja
and Caramana.* (* All the Missions of South America have names
composed of two words, the first of which is necessarily the name of a
saint, the patron of the church, and the second an Indian name, that
of the nation, or the spot where the establishment is placed. Thus we
say, San Jose de Maypures, Santa Cruz de Cachipo, San Juan Nepomuceno
de los Atures, etc. These compound names appear only in official
documents; the Inhabitants adopt but one of the two names, and
generally, provided it be sonorous, the Indian. As the names of saints
are several times repeated in neighbouring places, great confusion in
geography arises from these repetitions.
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