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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I Shall Content Myself With Observing, In
General, That Neither The Granitic Masses Remote From The Ancient Bed
Of The
Orinoco, but exposed during the rainy season to the
alternations of heat and moisture, nor the granitic rocks bathed by
The brownish waters of the Rio Negro, assume the appearance of
meteoric stones. The Indians say, that the rocks are black only where
the waters are white. They ought, perhaps, to add, where the waters
acquire great swiftness, and strike with force against the rocks of
the banks. Cementation seems to explain why the crusts augment so
little in thickness.
I know not whether it be an error, but in the Missions of the Orinoco,
the neighbourhood of bare rocks, and especially of the masses that
have crusts of carbon, oxide of iron, and manganese, are considered
injurious to health. In the torrid zone, still more than in others,
the people multiply pathogenic causes at will. They are afraid to
sleep in the open air, if forced to expose the face to the rays of the
full moon. They also think it dangerous to sleep on granite near the
river; and many examples are cited of persons, who, after having
passed the night on these black and naked rocks, have awakened in the
morning with a strong paroxysm of fever. Without entirely lending
faith to the assertions of the missionaries and natives, we generally
avoided the laxas negras, and stretched ourselves on the beach covered
with white sand, when we found no tree from which to suspend our
hammocks. At Carichana, the village is intended to be destroyed, and
its place changed, merely to remove it from the black rocks, or from a
site where, for a space of more than ten thousand square toises, banks
of bare granite form the surface. From similar motives, which must
appear very chimerical to the naturalists of Europe, the Jesuits Olmo,
Forneri, and Mellis, removed a village of Jaruros to three different
spots, between the Raudal of Tabaje and the Rio Anaveni. I merely
state these facts as they were related to me, because we are almost
wholly ignorant of the nature of the gaseous mixtures which cause the
insalubrity of the atmosphere. Can it be admitted that, under the
influence of excessive heat and of constant humidity, the black crusts
of the granitic rocks are capable of acting upon the ambient air, and
producing miasmata with a triple basis of carbon, azote, and hydrogen?
This I doubt. The granites of the Orinoco, it is true, often contain
hornblende; and those who are accustomed to practical labour in mines
are not ignorant that the most noxious exhalations rise from galleries
wrought in syenitic and hornblende rocks: but in an atmosphere renewed
every instant by the action of little currents of air, the effect
cannot be the same as in a mine.
It is probably dangerous to sleep on the laxas negras, only because
these rocks retain a very elevated temperature during the night. I
have found their temperature in the day at 48 degrees, the air in the
shade being at 29.7 degrees; during the night the thermometer on the
rock indicated 36 degrees, the air being at 26 degrees. When the
accumulation of heat in the stony masses has reached a stationary
degree, these masses become at the same hours nearly of the same
temperature. What they have acquired more in the day they lose at
night by radiation, the force of which depends on the state of the
surface of the radiating body, the interior arrangement of its
particles, and, above all, on the clearness of the sky, that is, on
the transparency of the atmosphere and the absence of clouds. 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. This augmentation of
heat adds to the insalubrity of the climate.
Among the causes of the depopulation of the Raudales, I have not
reckoned the small-pox, that malady which in other parts of America
makes such cruel ravages that the natives, seized with dismay, burn
their huts, kill their children, and renounce every kind of society.
This scourge is almost unknown on the banks of the Orinoco, and should
it penetrate thither, it is to be hoped that its effects may be
immediately counteracted by vaccination, the blessings of which are
daily felt along the coasts of Terra Firma. The causes which
depopulate the Christian settlements are, the repugnance of the
Indians for the regulations of the missions, insalubrity of climate,
bad nourishment, want of care in the diseases of children, and the
guilty practice of preventing pregnancy by the use of deleterious
herbs.
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