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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The
Heat From Which We Suffered Is Not Entirely Owing To The Temperature
Of The Air, But Is Produced By The Fine Sand Mingled With It; This
Sand Strikes Against The Face Of The Traveller, As It Does Against The
Ball Of The Thermometer.
I never observed the mercury rise in America,
amid a wind of sand, above 45.8 degrees centigrade.
Captain Lyon, with
whom I had the pleasure of conversing on his return from Mourzouk,
appeared to me also inclined to think that the temperature of
fifty-two degrees, so often felt in Fezzan, is produced in great part
by the grains of quartz suspended in the atmosphere. Between Pao and
the village of Santa Cruz de Cachipo, founded in 1749, and inhabited
by five hundred Caribs, we passed the western elongation of the little
table-land, known by the name of Mesa de Amana. This table-land forms
a point of partition between the Orinoco, the Guarapiche, and the
coast of New Andalusia. Its height is so inconsiderable that it would
scarcely be an obstacle to the establishment of inland navigation in
this part of the Llanos. The Rio Mano however, which flows into the
Orinoco above the confluence of the Carony, and which D'Anville (I
know not on what authority) has marked in the first edition of his
great map as issuing from the lake of Valencia, and receiving the
waters of the Guayra, could never have served as a natural canal
between two basins of rivers. No bifurcation of this kind exists in
the Llano. A great number of Carib Indians, who now inhabit the
missions of Piritu, were formerly on the north and east of the
table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of the Rio Arco, and
the Guarapiche. The incursions of Don Joseph Careno, one of the most
enterprising governors of the province of Cumana, occasioned a general
migration of independent Caribs toward the banks of the Lower Orinoco
in 1720.
The whole of this vast plain consists of secondary formations which to
the southward rest immediately on the granitic mountains of the
Orinoco. On the north-west they are separated by a narrow band of
transition-rocks from the primitive mountains of the shore of Caracas.
This abundance of secondary rocks, covering without interruption a
space of more than seven thousand square leagues,* is a phenomenon the
more remarkable in that region of the globe, because in the whole of
the Sierra da la Parima, between the right bank of the Orinoco and the
Rio Negro, there is, as in Scandinavia, a total absence of secondary
formations. (* Reckoning only that part of the Llanos which is bounded
by the Rio Apure on the south, and by the Sierra Nevada de Merida and
the Parima de las Rosas on the west.) The red sandstone, containing
some vestiges of fossil wood (of the family of monocotyledons) is seen
everywhere in the plains of Calabozo: farther east it is overlaid by
calcareous and gypseous rocks which conceal it from the research of
the geologist.
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