Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Numbers Of Pelicans And Of Flamingos, Which Fished In The Nooks
Or Harassed The Pelicans In Order To Seize Their Prey, Indicated Our
Approach To The Coast Of Cumana.
It is curious to observe at sunrise
how the sea-birds suddenly appear and animate the scene, reminding us,
in the most solitary regions, of the activity of our cities at the
dawn of day.
At nine in the morning we reached the gulf of Cariaco
which serves as a roadstead to the town of Cumana. The hill, crowned
by the castle of San Antonio, stood out, prominent from its whiteness,
on the dark curtain of the inland mountains. We gazed with interest on
the shore, where we first gathered plants in America, and where, some
months later, M. Bonpland had been in such danger. Among the cactuses,
that rise in columns twenty feet high, appear the Indian huts of the
Guaykeries. Every part of the landscape was familiar to us; the forest
of cactus, the scattered huts and that enormous ceiba, beneath which
we loved to bathe at the approach of night. Our friends at Cumana came
out to meet us: men of all castes, whom our frequent herborizations
had brought into contact with us, expressed the greater joy at sight
of us, as a report that we had perished on the banks of the Orinoco
had been current for several months. These reports had their origin
either in the severe illness of M. Bonpland, or in the fact of our
boat having been nearly lost in a gale above the mission of Uruana.
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