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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We
Cannot Advance In The Geologic Knowledge Of America Without Having
Continually Recourse To The Researches Of Comparative Geography.
The
small system of mountains, which we may provisionally call that of the
sources of the Rio Negro and
The Uaupes, and the culminant points of
which are not probably more than 100 or 120 toises high, appears to
extend southward to the basin of Rio Yupura, where rocky ridges form
the cataracts of the Rio de los Enganos and the Salto Grande de Yupura
(south latitude 0 degrees 40 minutes to north latitude 0 degrees 28
minutes), and the basin of the Upper Guaviare towards the west. We
find in the course of this river, from 60 to 70 leagues west of San
Fernando del Atabapo, two walls of rocks bounding the strait (nearly 3
degrees 10 minutes north latitude and 73 3/4 degrees longitude) where
father Maiella terminated his excursion. That missionary told me that,
in going up the Guaviare, he perceived near the strait (angostura) a
chain of mountains bounding the horizon on the south. It is not known
whether those mountains traverse the Guaviare more to the west, and
join the spurs which advance from the eastern Cordillera of New
Grenada, between the Rio Umadea and the Rio Ariari, in the direction
of the savannahs of San Juan de los Llanos. I doubt the existence of
this junction. If it really existed, the plains of the Lower Orinoco
would communicate with those of the Amazon only by a very narrow
land-strait, on the east of the mountainous country which surrounds
the source of the Rio Negro: but it is more probable that this
mountainous country (a small system of mountains, geognostically
dependent on the Sierra Parime) forms as it were an island in the
Llanos of Guaviare and Yupura. Father Pugnet, Principal of the
Franciscan convent at Popayan, assured me, that when he went from the
missions settled on the Rio Caguan to Aramo, a village situated on the
Rio Guayavero, he found only treeless savannahs, extending as far as
the eye could reach. The chain of mountains placed by several modern
geographers, between the Meta and the Vichada, and which appears to
link the Andes of New Grenada with the Sierra Parime, is altogether
imaginary.
We have now examined the prolongation of the Sierra Parime on the
west, towards the source of the Rio Negro: it remains for us to follow
the same group in its eastern direction. The mountains of the Upper
Orinoco, eastward of the Raudal of the Guaharibos (north latitude 1
degree 15 minutes longitude 67 degrees 38 minutes), join the chain of
Pacaraina, which divides the waters of the Carony and the Rio Branco,
and of which the micaceous schist, resplendent with silvery lustre,
figures so conspicuously in Raleigh's El Dorado. The part of that
chain containing the sources of the Orinoco has not yet been explored;
but its prolongation more to the east, between the meridian of the
military post of Guirior and the Rupunuri, a tributary of the
Essequibo, is known to me through the travels of the Spaniards Antonio
Santos and Nicolas Rodriguez, and also by the geodesic labours of two
Portuguese, Pontes and Almeida.
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