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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But This Enjoyment, As We Ourselves Experienced, Is Not Of Long
Duration.
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.
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