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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Nearer We Look Down On The Small
Desert Archipelago Of The Four Morros Del Tunal, The Caribbee And The
Lobos Islands.
After much vain search we at length found, before we descended to the
northern coast of the peninsula of Araya, in a ravine of very
difficult access (Aroyo del Robalo), the mineral which had been shown
to us at Cumana.
The mica-slate changed suddenly into carburetted and
shining clay-slate. It was an ampelite; and the waters (for there are
small springs in those parts, and some have recently been discovered
near the village of Maniquarez) were impregnated with yellow oxide of
iron and had a styptic taste. We found the sides of the neighbouring
rocks lined with capillary sulphate of alumina in effervescence; and
real beds, two inches thick, full of native alum, extending as far as
the eye could reach in the clay slate. The alum is greyish white,
somewhat dull on the surface and of an almost glassy lustre
internally. Its fracture is not fibrous but imperfectly conchoidal. It
is slightly translucent when its fragments are thin; and has a
sweetish and astringent taste without any bitter mixture. When on the
spot, I proposed to myself the question whether this alum, so pure,
and filling beds in the clay-slate without leaving the smallest void,
be of a formation contemporary with the rock, or whether it be of a
recent, and in some sort secondary, origin, like the muriate of soda,
found sometimes in small veins, where strongly concentrated springs
traverse beds of gypsum or clay.
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