Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 21 of 777 - First - Home
The
Marquis Del Toro Has Undertaken To Put This Design Into Execution,
Employing The Fine Granite Of The Sierra De Mariara, And Establishing
Limnometers, On A Bottom Of Gneiss Rock, So Common In The Lake Of
Valencia.
It is impossible to anticipate the limits, more or less narrow, to
which this basin of water will one day be confined, when an
equilibrium between the streams flowing in and the produce of
evaporation and filtration, shall be completely established.
The idea
very generally spread, that the lake will soon entirely disappear,
seems to me chimerical. If in consequence of great earthquakes, or
other causes equally mysterious, ten very humid years should succeed
to long droughts; if the mountains should again become clothed with
forests, and great trees overshadow the shore and the plains of
Aragua, we should more probably see the volume of the waters augment,
and menace that beautiful cultivation which now trenches on the basin
of the lake.
While some of the cultivators of the valleys of Aragua fear the total
disappearance of the lake, and others its return to the banks it has
deserted, we hear the question gravely discussed at Caracas, whether
it would not be advisable, in order to give greater extent to
agriculture, to conduct the waters of the lake into the Llanos, by
digging a canal towards the Rio Pao. The possibility* of this
enterprise cannot be denied, particularly by having recourse to
tunnels, or subterranean canals. (The dividing ridge, namely, that
which divides the waters between the valleys of Aragua and the Llanos,
lowers so much towards the west of Guigue, as we have already
observed, that there are ravines which conduct the waters of the Cano
de Cambury, the Rio Valencia, and the Guataparo, in the time of
floods, to the Rio Pao; but it would be easier to open a navigable
canal from the lake of Valencia to the Orinoco, by the Pao, the
Portuguesa, and the Apure, than to dig a draining canal level with the
bottom of the lake.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 21 of 777
Words from 5540 to 5879
of 211397
