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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They Are
Used At San Balthasar In The Indian Game Of Tennis, Which Is
Celebrated Among The Inhabitants Of Uruana And Encaramada; They Are
Also Cut Into Cylinders, To Be Used As Corks, And Are Far Preferable
To Those Made Of The Bark Of The Cork-Tree.
This use of caoutchouc appeared to us the more worthy notice, as we
had been often embarrassed by the want of European corks.
The great
utility of cork is fully understood in countries where trade has not
supplied this bark in plenty. Equinoctial America nowhere produces,
not even on the back of the Andes, an oak resembling the Quercus
suber; and neither the light wood of the bombax, the ochroma, and
other malvaceous plants, nor the rhachis of maize, of which the
natives make use, can well supply the place of our corks. The
missionary showed us, before the Casa de los Solteros (the house where
the young unmarried men reside), a drum, which was a hollow cylinder
of wood, two feet long and eighteen inches thick. This drum was beaten
with great masses of dapicho, which served as drumsticks; it had
openings which could be stopped by the hand at will, to vary the
sounds, and was fixed on two light supports. Savage notions love noisy
music; the drum and the botuto, or trumpet of baked earth, in which a
tube of three or four feet long communicates with several barrels, are
indispensable instruments among the Indians for their grand pieces of
music.
The night of the 30th of April was sufficiently fine for observing the
meridian heights of x of the Southern Cross, and the two large stars
in the feet of the Centaur. I found the latitude of San Balthasar 3
degrees 14 minutes 23 seconds. Horary angles of the sun gave 70
degrees 14 minutes 21 seconds for the longitude by the chronometer.
The dip of the magnetic needle was 27.8 degrees (cent div). We left
the mission at a late hour in the morning, and continued to go up the
Atabapo for five miles; then, instead of following that river to its
source in the east, where it bears the name of Atacavi, we entered the
Rio Temi. Before we reached its confluence, a granitic eminence on the
western bank, near the mouth of the Guasacavi, fixed our attention: it
is called Piedra de la Guahiba (Rock of the Guahiba woman), or the
Piedra de la Madre (Mother's Rock.) We inquired the cause of so
singular a denomination. Father Zea could not satisfy our curiosity;
but some weeks after, another missionary, one of the predecessors of
that ecclesiastic, whom we found settled at San Fernando as president
of the missions, related to us an event which excited in our minds the
most painful feelings. If, in these solitary scenes, man scarcely
leaves behind him any trace of his existence, it is doubly humiliating
for a European to see perpetuated by so imperishable a monument of
nature as a rock, the remembrance of the moral degradation of our
species, and the contrast between the virtue of a savage, and the
barbarism of civilized man!
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