Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Among Savage Nations Great Rivers Bear
Different Denominations In The Different Portions Of Their Course.
The
Passage of Baraguan presents a picturesque scene.
The granite rocks
are perpendicular. They form a range of mountains lying north-west and
south-east; and the river cutting this dyke nearly at a right angle,
the summits of the mountains appear like separate peaks. Their
elevation in general does not surpass one hundred and twenty toises;
but their situation in the midst of a small plain, their steep
declivities, and their flanks destitute of vegetation, give them a
majestic character. They are composed of enormous masses of granite of
a parallelopipedal figure, but rounded at the edges, and heaped one
upon another. The blocks are often eighty feet long, and twenty or
thirty broad. They would seem to have been piled up by some external
force, if the proximity of a rock identical in its composition, not
separated into blocks but filled with veins, did not prove that the
parallelopipedal form is owing solely to the action of the atmosphere.
These veins, two or three inches thick, are distinguished by a
fine-grained quartz-granite crossing a coarse-grained granite almost
porphyritic, and abounding in fine crystals of red feldspar. I sought
in vain, in the Cordillera of Baraguan, for hornblende, and those
steatitic masses that characterise several granites of the Higher Alps
in Switzerland.
We landed in the middle of the strait of Baraguan to measure its
breadth. The rocks project so much towards the river that I measured
with difficulty a base of eighty toises.
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