Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 366 of 406 - First - Home
The Inhabitants Of Esmeralda Related To Us, That In
The Year 1795, An Hour Before Sunset, When The Mosquitos Usually Form
A Very Thick Cloud, The Air Was Observed To Be Suddenly Free From
Them.
During the space of twenty minutes, not one insect was
perceived, although the sky was cloudless, and no wind announced rain.
It is necessary to have lived in those countries to comprehend the
degree of surprise which the sudden disappearance of the insects must
have produced.
The inhabitants congratulated each other, and inquired
whether this state of happiness, this relief from pain (feicidad y
alivio), could be of any duration. But soon, instead of enjoying the
present, they yielded to chimerical fears, and imagined that the order
of nature was perverted. Some old Indians, the sages of the place,
asserted that the disappearance of the insects must be the precursor
of a great earthquake. Warm discussions arose; the least noise amid
the foliage of the trees was listened to with an attentive ear; and
when the air was again filled with mosquitos they were almost hailed
with pleasure. We could not guess what modification of the atmosphere
had caused this phenomenon, which must not be confounded with the
periodical replacing of one species of insects by another.
After four hours' navigation down the Orinoco we arrived at the point
of the bifurcation. Our resting place was on the same beach of the
Cassiquiare, where a few days previously our great dog had, as we
believe, been carried off by the jaguars. All the endeavours of the
Indians to discover any traces of the animal were fruitless. The cries
of the jaguars were heard during the whole night.* (* This frequency
of large jaguars is somewhat remarkable in a country destitute of
cattle. The tigers of the Upper Orinoco are far less bountifully
supplied with prey than those of the Pampas of Buenos Ayres and the
Llanos of Caracas, which are covered with herds of cattle. More than
four thousand jaguars are killed annually in the Spanish colonies,
several of them equalling the mean size of the royal tiger of Asia.
Two thousand skins of jaguars were formerly exported annually from
Buenos Ayres alone.) These animals are very frequent in the tracts
situated between the Cerro Maraguaca, the Unturan, and the banks of
the Pamoni. There also is found that black species of tiger* of which
I saw some fine skins at Esmeralda. (* Gmelin, in his Synonyma, seems
to confound this animal, under the name of Felis discolor, with the
great American lion (Felis concolor) which is very different from the
puma of the Andes of Quito.) This animal is celebrated for its
strength and ferocity; it appears to be still larger than the common
jaguar. The black spots are scarcely visible on the dark-brown ground
of its skin. The Indians assert, that these tigers are very rare, that
they never mingle with the common jaguars, and that they form another
race. I believe that Prince Maximilian of Neuwied, who has enriched
American zoology by so many important observations, acquired the same
information farther to the south, in the hot part of Brazil.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 366 of 406
Words from 189996 to 190522
of 211397