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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How little did we anticipate the
sad fate that awaited him.
He took charge of a part of our
collections; and a friend of his own confided to his care a child who
was to be conveyed to Spain for its education. Alas! the collection,
the child and the young ecclesiastic were all buried in the waves.
South-east of Nueva Barcelona, at the distance of two Leagues, there
rises a lofty chain of mountains, abutting on the Cerro del Bergantin,
which is visible at Cumana. This spot is known by the name of the hot
waters, (aguas calientes). When I felt my health sufficiently
restored, we made an excursion thither on a cool and misty morning.
The waters, which are loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen, issue from a
quartzose sandstone, lying on compact limestone, the same as that we
had examined at the Morro. We again found in this limestone
intercalated beds of black hornstein, passing into kieselschiefer. It
is not, however, a transition rock; by its position, its division into
small strata, its whiteness and its dull and conchoidal fractures
(with very flattened cavities), it rather approximates to the
limestone of Jura. The real kieselschiefer and Lydian-stone have not
been observed hitherto except in the transition-slates and limestones.
Is the sandstone whence the springs of the Bergantin issue of the same
formation as the sandstone of the Imposible and the Tumiriquiri? The
temperature of the thermal waters is only 43.2 degrees centigrade (the
atmosphere being 27). They flow first to the distance of forty toises
over the rocky surface of the ground; then they rush down into a
natural cavern; and finally they pierce through the limestone to issue
out at the foot of the mountain on the left bank of the little river
Narigual. The springs, while in contact with the oxygen of the
atmosphere, deposit a good deal of sulphur. I did not collect, as I
had done at Mariara, the bubbles of air that rise in jets from these
thermal waters. They no doubt contain a large quantity of nitrogen
because the sulphuretted hydrogen decomposes the mixture of oxygen and
nitrogen dissolved in the spring. The sulphurous waters of San Juan
which issue from calcareous rock, like those of the Bergantin, have
also a low temperature (31.3 degrees); while in the same region the
temperature of the sulphurous waters of Mariara and Las Trincheras
(near Porto Cabello), which gush immediately from gneiss-granite, is
58.9 degrees the former, and 90.4 degrees the latter. It would seem as
if the heat which these springs acquire in the interior of the globe
diminishes in proportion as they pass from primitive to secondary
superposed rocks.
Our excursion to the Aguas Calientes of Bergantin ended with a
vexatious accident. Our host had lent us one of his finest
saddle-horses. We were warned at the same time not to ford the little
river of Narigual. We passed over a sort of bridge, or rather some
trunks of trees laid closely together, and we made our horses swim,
holding their bridles.
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