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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First Appears A Narrow Wall Eighty
Feet High, And Perpendicular; And At The Southern Extremity Of This
Wall Are Two Turrets, The Courses Of Which Are Of Granite, And Nearly
Horizontal.
The grouping of the rocks of Guanari is so symmetrical
that they might be taken for the ruins of an ancient edifice.
Are they
the remains of islets in the midst of an inland sea, that covered the
flat ground between the Sierra Parime and the Parecis mountains?* (*
The Sierra de la Parime, or of the Upper Orinoco, and the Sierra (or
Campos) dos Parecis, are part of the mountains of Matto Grosso, and
form the northern back of the Sierra de Chiquitos. I here name the two
chains of mountains running from east to west, and bordering the
plains or basins of the Cassiquiare, the Rio Negro, and the Amazon,
between 5 degrees 30 minutes north, and 14 degrees south latitude.) or
have these walls of rock, these turrets of granite, been upheaved by
the elastic forces that still act in the interior of our planet? We
may be permitted to meditate a little on the origin of mountains,
after having seen the position of the Mexican volcanoes, and of
trachyte summits on an elongated crevice; having found in the Andes of
South America primitive and volcanic rocks in a straight line in the
same chain; and when we recollect the island, three miles in
circumference, and of a great height, which in modern times issued
from the depths of the ocean near Oonalaska.
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