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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There Is Doubtless Something Solemn And Imposing In The
Aspect Of A Boundless Horizon, Whether Viewed From The Summits Of The
Andes Or The Highest Alps, Amid The Expanse Of The Ocean Or In The
Vast Plains Of Venezuela And Tucuman.
Infinity of space, as poets in
every language say, is reflected within ourselves; it is associated
with ideas of a superior order; it elevates the mind which delights in
the calm of solitary meditation.
It is true, also, that every view of
unbounded space bears a peculiar character. The prospect surveyed from
a solitary peak varies according as the clouds reposing on the plain
extend in layers, are conglomerated in groups, or present to the
astonished eye, through broad openings, the habitations of man, the
labour of agriculture, or the verdant tint of the aerial ocean. An
immense sheet of water, animated by a thousand various beings even to
its utmost depths, changing perpetually in colour and aspect, moveable
at its surface like the element that agitates it, all charm the
imagination during long voyages by sea; but the dusty and creviced
Llano, throughout a great part of the year, has a depressing influence
on the mind by its unchanging monotony. When, after eight or ten days'
journey, the traveller becomes accustomed to the mirage and the
brilliant verdure of a few tufts of mauritia* (* The fan-palm, or
sago-tree of Guiana.) scattered from league to league, he feels the
want of more varied impressions. He loves again to behold the great
tropical trees, the wild rush of torrents or hills and valleys
cultivated by the hand of the labourer. If the deserts of Africa and
of the Llanos or savannahs of the New Continent filled a still greater
space than they actually occupy, nature would be deprived of many of
the beautiful products peculiar to the torrid zone.* (* In calculating
from maps on a very large scale I found the Llanos of Cumana,
Barcelona, and Caracas, from the delta of the Orinoco to the northern
bank of the Apure, 7200 square leagues; the Llanos between the Apure
and Putumayo, 21,000 leagues; the Pampas on the north-west of Buenos
Ayres, 40,000 square leagues; the Pampas south of the parallel of
Buenos Ayres, 37,000 square leagues. The total area of the Llanos of
South America, covered with gramina, is consequently 105,200 square
leagues, twenty leagues to an equatorial degree.) The heaths of the
north, the steppes of the Volga and the Don, are scarcely poorer in
species of plants and animals than are the twenty-eight thousand
square leagues of savannahs extending in a semicircle from north-east
to south-west, from the mouths of the Orinoco to the banks of the
Caqueta and the Putumayo, beneath the finest sky in the world, and in
the land of plantains and bread-fruit trees. The influence of the
equinoctial climate, everywhere else so vivifying, is not felt in
places where the great associations of gramina almost exclude every
other plant. Judging from the aspect of the soil we might have
believed ourselves to be in the temperate zone and even still farther
northward but that a few scattered palms, and at nightfall the fine
constellations of the southern sky (the Centaur, Canopus, and the
innumerable nebulae with which the Ship is resplendent), reminded us
that we were only eight degrees distant from the equator.
A phenomenon which fixed the attention of De Luc and which in these
latter years has furnished a subject of speculation to geologists,
occupied us much during our journey across the Llanos. I allude not to
those blocks of primitive rock which occur, as in the Jura, on the
slope of limestone mountains, but to those enormous blocks of granite
and syenite which, in limits very distinctly marked by nature, are
found scattered on the north of Holland, Germany and the countries of
the Baltic. It seems to be now proved that, distributed as in radii,
they came at the time of the ancient revolutions of our globe from the
Scandinavian peninsula southward; and that they did not primitively
belong to the granitic chains of the Harz and Erzgeberg, which they
approach without, however, reaching their foot.* (* Leopold von Buch,
Voyage en Norwege volume 1 page 30.) I was surprised at not seeing one
of these blocks in the Llanos of Venezuela, though these immense
plains are bounded on the south by the Sierra Parima, a group of
mountains entirely granitic and exhibiting in its denticulated and
often columnar peaks traces of the most violent destruction. Northward
the granitic chain of the Silla de Caracas and Porto Cabello are
separated from the Llanos by a screen of mountains that are schistose
between Villa de Cura and Parapara, and calcareous between the
Bergantin and Caripe. I was no less struck by this absence of blocks
on the banks of the Amazon. La Condamine affirms that from the Pongo
de Manseriche to the Strait of Pauxis not the smallest stone is to be
found. Now the basin of the Rio Negro and of the Amazon is also a
Llano, a plain like those of Venezuela and Buenos Ayres. The
difference consists only in the state of vegetation. The two Llanos
situated at the northern and southern extremities of South America are
covered with gramina; they are treeless savannahs; but the
intermediate Llano, that of the Amazon, exposed to almost continual
equatorial rains, is a thick forest. I do not remember having heard
that the Pampas of Buenos Ayres or the savannahs of the Missouri* and
New Mexico contain granitic blocks. (* Are there any isolated blocks
in North America northward of the great lakes?) The absence of this
phenomenon appears general in the New World as it probably also is in
Sahara, in Africa; for we must not confound the rocky masses that
pierce the soil in the midst of the desert, and of which travellers
often make mention, with mere scattered fragments. These facts seem to
prove that the blocks of Scandinavian granite which cover the sandy
countries on the south of the Baltic, and those of Westphalia and
Holland, must be traced to some local revolution.
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