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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Opposite To The Point Where The Orinoco Forms Its Bifurcation, The
Granitic Group Of Duida Rises In An Amphitheatre On The Right Bank Of
The River.
This mountain, which the missionaries call a volcano, is
nearly eight thousand feet high.
It is perpendicular on the south and
west, and has an aspect of solemn grandeur. Its summit is bare and
stony, but, wherever its less steep declivities are covered with mould
vast forests appear suspended on its flanks. At the foot of Duida is
the mission of Esmeralda, a little hamlet with eighty inhabitants,
surrounded by a lovely plain, intersected by rills of black but limpid
water. This plain is adorned with clumps of the mauritia palm, the
sago-tree of America. Nearer the mountain, the distance of which from
the cross of the mission I found to be seven thousand three hundred
toises, the marshy plain changes to a savannah, and spends itself
along the lower region of the Cordillera. Large pine-apples are there
found of a delicious flavour; that species of bromelia always grows
solitary among the gramina, like our Colchicum autumnale, while the B.
karatas, another species of the same genus, is a social plant, like
our whortleberries and heaths. The pine-apples of Esmeralda are
cultivated throughout Guiana. There are certain spots in America, as
in Europe, where different fruits attain their highest perfection. The
sapota-plum (achra) should be eaten at the Island of Margareta or at
Cumana: the chirimoya (very different from the custard-apple and
sweet-sop of the West India Islands) at Loxa in Peru; the grenadilla,
or parcha, at Caracas; and the pine-apple at Esmeralda, or in the
island of Cuba. The pine-apple forms the ornament of the fields near
the Havannah, where it is planted in parallel rows; on the sides of
the Duida it embellishes the turf of the savannahs, lifting its yellow
fruit, crowned with a tuft of silvery leaves, above the setaria, the
paspalum, and a few cyperaceae. This plant, which the Indians of the
Orinoco call ana-curua, has been propagated since the sixteenth
century in the interior of China,* and some English travellers found
it recently, together with other plants indubitably American (maize,
cassava, tobacco, and pimento), on the banks of the River Congo, in
Africa. (* No doubt remains of the American origin of the Bromelia
ananas. See Cayley's Life of Raleigh volume 1 page 61. Gili volume 1
pages 210 and 336. Robert Brown, Geogr. Observ. on the Plants of the
River Congo 1818 page 50.)
There is no missionary at Esmeralda; the monk appointed to celebrate
mass in that hamlet is settled at Santa Barbara, more than fifty
leagues distant; and he visits this spot but five or six times in a
year. We were cordially received by an old officer, who took us for
Catalonian shopkeepers, and who supposed that trade had led to the
missions. On seeing packages of paper intended for drying our plants,
he smiled at our simple ignorance.
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