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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When We Visited The
Peninsula The Preceding Year There Was A Great Scarcity Of Water; The
Goats For Want Of Grass Died By Hundreds.
During our stay at the
Orinoco the order of the seasons seemed to be entirely changed.
At
Araya, Cochen, and even in the island of Margareta it had rained
abundantly; and those showers were remembered by the inhabitants in
the same way as a fall of aerolites would be noted in the recollection
of the naturalists of Europe.
The Indian who was our guide scarcely knew in what direction we should
find the alum; he was ignorant of its real position. This ignorance of
localities characterises almost all the guides here, who are chosen
from among the most indolent class of the people. We wandered for
eight or nine hours among rocks totally bare of vegetation. The
mica-slate passes sometimes to clay-slate of a darkish grey. I was
again struck by the extreme regularity in the direction and
inclination of the strata. They run north 50 degrees east, inclining
from 60 to 70 degrees north-west. This is the general direction which
I had observed in the gneiss-granite of Caracas and the Orinoco, in
the hornblende-slates of Angostura, and even in the greater part of
the secondary rocks we had just examined. The beds, over a vast extent
of land, make the same angle with the meridian of the place; they
present a parallelism, which may be considered as one of the great
geologic laws capable of being verified by precise measures. Advancing
toward Cape Chuparuparu, the veins of quartz that cross the mica-slate
increase in size. We found some from one to two toises broad, full of
small fasciculated crystals of rutile titanite. We sought in vain for
cyanite, which we had discovered in some blocks near Maniquarez.
Farther on the mica-state presents not veins, but little beds of
graphite or carburetted iron. They are from two to three inches thick
and have precisely the same direction and inclination as the rock.
Graphite, in primitive soils, marks the first appearance of carbon on
the globe - that of carbon uncombined with hydrogen. It is anterior to
the period when the surface of the earth became covered with
monocotyledonous plants. From the summit of those wild mountains there
is a majestic view of the island of Margareta. Two groups of mountains
already mentioned, those of Macanao and La Vega de San Juan, rise from
the bosom of the waters. The capital of the island, La Asuncion, the
port of Pampatar, and the villages of Pueblo de la Mar, Pueblo del
Norte and San Juan belong to the second and most easterly of these
groups. The western group, the Macanao, is almost entirely
uninhabited. The isthmus that divides these large masses of mica-slate
was scarcely visible; its form appeared changed by the effect of the
mirage and we recognized the intermediate part, through which runs the
Laguna Grande, only by two small hills of a sugarloaf form, in the
meridian of the Punta de Piedras.
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