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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The Nile Has No Porpoises:*
Those Of The Sea Go Up The Delta No Farther Than Biana And Metonbis
Towards Selamoun.
(* Those dolphins that enter the mouth of the Nile,
did not escape the observation of the ancients.
In a bust in syenite,
preserved in the museum at Paris, the sculptor has represented them
half concealed in the undulatory beard of the god of the river.)
At five in the evening we regained with some difficulty the bed of the
river. Our canoe remained fast for some minutes between two trunks of
trees; and it was no sooner disengaged than we reached a spot where
several paths, or small channels, crossed each other, so that the
pilot was puzzled to distinguish the most open path. We navigated
through a forest so thick that we could guide ourselves neither by the
sun nor by the stars. We were again struck during this day by the want
of arborescent ferns in that country; they diminish visibly from the
sixth degree of north latitude, while the palm-trees augment
prodigiously towards the equator. Fern-trees belong to a climate less
hot, and a soil but little mountainous. It is only where there are
mountains that these majestic plants descend towards the plains; they
seem to avoid perfectly flat grounds, as those through which run the
Cassiquiare, the Temi, Inirida, and the Rio Negro. We passed in the
night near a rock, called the Piedra de Astor by the missionaries. The
ground from the mouth of the Guaviare constantly displays the same
geological formation.
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