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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When The
Declination Of The Sun Varies Very Little, This Luminary Adds Daily
Nearly The Same Quantities Of Heat, And The Rocks Are Not Hotter At
The End Than In The Middle Of Summer.
There is a certain maximum which
they cannot pass, because they do not change the state of their
surface, their density, or their capacity for caloric.
On the shores
of the Orinoco, on getting out of one's hammock during the night, and
touching with the bare feet the rocky surface of the ground, the
sensation of heat experienced is very remarkable. I observed pretty
constantly, in putting the bulb of the thermometer in contact with the
ledges of bare rocks, that the laxas negras are hotter during the day
than the reddish-white granites at a distance from the river; but the
latter cool during the night less rapidly than the former. It may be
easily conceived that the emission and loss of caloric is more rapid
in masses with black crusts than in those which abound in laminae of
silvery mica. When walking between the hours of one and three in the
afternoon, at Carichana, Atures, or Maypures, among those blocks of
stone destitute of vegetable mould, and piled up to great heights, one
feels a sensation of suffocation, as if standing before the opening of
a furnace. The winds, if ever felt in those woody regions, far from
bringing coolness, appear more heated when they have passed over beds
of stone, and heaps of rounded blocks of granite.
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