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 Torment Of The Mosquitos
Augmented Severely, Notwithstanding The Decrease Of Heat.
We never
suffered so much from them as at San Borja.
We could neither speak nor
uncover our faces without having our mouths and noses filled with
insects. We were surprised not to find the thermometer at 35 or 36
degrees; the extreme irritation of the skin made us believe that the
air was scorching. We passed the night on the beach of Guaripo. The
fear of the little caribe fish prevented us from bathing. The
crocodiles we had met with this day were all of an extraordinary size,
from twenty-two to twenty-four feet.
Our sufferings from the zancudos made us depart at five o'clock on the
morning of the 14th. There are fewer insects in the strata of air
lying immediately on the river, than near the edge of the forests. We
stopped to breakfast at the island of Guachaco, or Vachaco, where the
granite is immediately covered by a formation of sandstone, or
conglomerate. This sandstone contains fragments of quartz, and even of
feldspar, cemented by indurated clay. It exhibits little veins of
brown iron-ore, which separate in laminae, or plates, of one line in
thickness. We had already found these plates on the shores between
Encaramada and Baraguan, where the missionaries had sometimes taken
them for an ore of gold, and sometimes for tin. It is probable, that
this secondary formation occupied formerly a larger space. Having
passed the mouth of the Rio Parueni, beyond which the Maco Indians
dwell, we spent the night on the island of Panumana. I could with
difficulty take the altitudes of Canopus, in order to fix the
longitude of the point, near which the river suddenly turns towards
the west. The island of Panumana is rich in plants. We there again
found those shelves of bare rock, those tufts of melastomas, those
thickets of small shrubs, the blended scenery of which had charmed us
in the plains of Carichana. The mountains of the Great Cataracts
bounded the horizon towards the south-east. In proportion as we
advanced, the shores of the Orinoco exhibited a more imposing and
picturesque aspect.
CHAPTER 2.20.
THE MOUTH OF THE RIO ANAVENI.
PEAK OF UNIANA.
MISSION OF ATURES.
CATARACT, OR RAUDAL OF MAPARA.
ISLETS OF SURUPAMANA AND UIRAPURI.
The river of the Orinoco, in running from south to north, is crossed
by a chain of granitic mountains. Twice confined in its course, it
turbulently breaks on the rocks, that form steps and transverse dykes.
Nothing can be grander than the aspect of this spot. Neither the fall
of the Tequendama, near Santa Fe de Bogota, nor the magnificent scenes
of the Cordilleras, could weaken the impression produced upon my mind
by the first view of the rapids of Atures and of Maypures. When the
spectator is so stationed that the eye can at once take in the long
succession of cataracts, the immense sheet of foam and vapours
illumined by the rays of the setting sun, the whole river seems as it
were suspended over its bed.
Scenes so astonishing must for ages have fixed the attention of the
inhabitants of the New World. When Diego de Todaz, Alfonzo de Herrera,
and the intrepid Raleigh, anchored at the mouth of the Orinoco, they
were informed by the Indians of the Great Cataracts, which they
themselves had never visited, and which they even confounded with
cascades farther to the east. Whatever obstacles the force of
vegetation under the torrid zone may throw in the way of intercourse
among nations, all that relates to the course of great rivers acquires
a celebrity which extends to vast distances. The Orinoco, the Amazon,
and the Uruguay, traverse, like inland arms of seas, in different
directions, a land covered with forests, and inhabited by tribes, part
of whom are cannibals. It is not yet two hundred years since
civilization and the light of a more humane religion have pursued
their way along the banks of these ancient canals traced by the hand
of nature; long, however, before the introduction of agriculture,
before communications for the purposes of barter were established
among these scattered and often hostile tribes, the knowledge of
extraordinary phenomena, of falls of water, of volcanic fires, and of
snows resisting all the ardent heat of summer, was propagated by a
thousand fortuitous circumstances. Three hundred leagues from the
coast, in the centre of South America, among nations whose excursions
do not extend to three days' journey, we find an idea of the ocean,
and words that denote a mass of salt water extending as far as the eye
can discern. Various events, which repeatedly occur in savage life,
contribute to enlarge these conceptions. In consequence of the petty
wars between neighbouring tribes, a prisoner is brought into a strange
country, and treated as a poito or mero, that is to say, as a slave.
After being often sold, he is dragged to new wars, escapes, and
returns home; he relates what he has seen, and what he has heard from
those whose tongue he has been compelled to learn. As on discovering a
coast, we hear of great inland animals, so, on entering the valley of
a vast river, we are surprised to find that savages, who are strangers
to navigation, have acquired a knowledge of distant things. In the
infant state of society, the exchange of ideas precedes, to a certain
point, the exchange of productions.
The two great cataracts of the Orinoco, the celebrity of which is so
far-spread and so ancient, are formed by the passage of the river
across the mountains of Parima. They are called by the natives Mapara
and Quittuna; but the missionaries have substituted for these names
those of Atures and Maypures, after the names of the tribes which were
first assembled together in the nearest villages. On the coast of
Caracas, the two Great Cataracts are denoted by the simple appellation
of the two Raudales, or rapids; a denomination which implies that the
other falls of water, even the rapids of Camiseta and of Carichana,
are not considered as worthy of attention when compared with the
cataracts of Atures and Maypures.
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