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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Blocks of granite, piled upon one another,
appear from afar like castles in ruins.
Vast sandy shores keep the
skirting of the forest at a distance from the river; but we discover
amid them, in the horizon, solitary palm-trees, backed by the sky, and
crowning the tops of the mountains. We passed two hours on a large
rock, standing in the middle of the Orinoco, and called the Piedra de
la Paciencia, or the Stone of Patience, because the canoes, in going
up, are sometimes detained there two days, to extricate themselves
from the whirlpool caused by this rock.
The Rio Meta, which traverses the vast plains of Casanare, and which
is navigable as far as the foot of the Andes of New Grenada, will one
day be of great political importance to the inhabitants of Guiana and
Venezuela. From the Golfo Triste and the Boca del Drago a small fleet
may go up the Orinoco and the Meta to within fifteen or twenty leagues
of Santa Fe de Bogota. The flour of New Grenada may be conveyed the
same way. The Meta is like a canal of communication between countries
placed in the same latitude, but differing in their productions as
much as France and Senegal. The Meta has its source in the union of
two rivers which descend from the paramos of Chingasa and Suma Paz.
The first is the Rio Negro, which, lower down, receives the
Pachaquiaro; the second is the Rio de Aguas Blancas, or Umadea.
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