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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I Say Apparent Dryness, For My
Hygrometric Observations Prove That The Atmosphere Of Cumana And Araya
Contains Nearly Nine-Tenths Of The Quantity Of Watery Vapour Necessary
To Its Perfect Saturation.
It is this air, at once hot and humid, that
nourishes those vegetable reservoirs, the cucurbitaceous plants, the
agaves and melocactuses half-buried in the sand.
When we visited the
peninsula the preceding year there was a great scarcity of water; the
goats for want of grass died by hundreds. During our stay at the
Orinoco the order of the seasons seemed to be entirely changed. At
Araya, Cochen, and even in the island of Margareta it had rained
abundantly; and those showers were remembered by the inhabitants in
the same way as a fall of aerolites would be noted in the recollection
of the naturalists of Europe.
The Indian who was our guide scarcely knew in what direction we should
find the alum; he was ignorant of its real position. This ignorance of
localities characterises almost all the guides here, who are chosen
from among the most indolent class of the people. We wandered for
eight or nine hours among rocks totally bare of vegetation. The
mica-slate passes sometimes to clay-slate of a darkish grey. I was
again struck by the extreme regularity in the direction and
inclination of the strata. They run north 50 degrees east, inclining
from 60 to 70 degrees north-west. This is the general direction which
I had observed in the gneiss-granite of Caracas and the Orinoco, in
the hornblende-slates of Angostura, and even in the greater part of
the secondary rocks we had just examined.
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