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 624 of 777 - First - Home
The Noise Of The Little Cataract
Augmented Sensibly During The Night, And Our Indians Asserted That It
Was A Certain Presage Of Rain.
I recollected that the mountaineers of
the Alps have great confidence in the same prognostic.* (* "It is
going to rain, because we hear the murmur of the torrents nearer," say
the mountaineers of the Alps, like those of the Andes.
The cause of
the phenomenon is a modification of the atmosphere, which has an
influence at once on the sonorous and on the luminous undulations. The
prognostic drawn from the increase and the intensity of sound is
intimately connected with the prognostic drawn from a less extinction
of light. The mountaineers predict a change of weather, when, the air
being calm, the Alps covered with perpetual snow seem on a sudden to
be nearer the observer, and their outlines are marked with great
distinctness on the azure sky. What is it that causes the want of
homogeneity in the vertical strata of the atmosphere to disappear
instantaneously?) It fell before sunrise, and the araguato monkeys had
warned us, by their lengthened howlings, of the approaching rain, long
before the noise of the cataract increased.
On the 14th, the mosquitos, and especially the ants, drove us from the
shore before two in the morning. We had hitherto been of opinion that
the ants did not crawl along the cords by which the hammocks are
usually suspended: whether we were correct in this supposition, or
whether the ants fell on us from the tops of the trees, I cannot say;
but certain it is that we had great difficulty to keep ourselves free
from these troublesome insects.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 624 of 777
Words from 169588 to 169865
of 211397
