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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We had now been confined
thirty-six days in a narrow boat, so unsteady that it would have been
overset by any person rising imprudently from his seat, without
warning the rowers.
We had suffered severely from the sting of
insects, but we had withstood the insalubrity of the climate; we had
passed without accident the great number of waterfalls and bars, which
impede the navigation of the rivers, and often render it more
dangerous than long voyages by sea. After all we had endured, it may
be conceived that we felt no little satisfaction in having reached the
tributary streams of the Amazon, having passed the isthmus that
separates two great systems of rivers, and in being sure of having
fulfilled the most important object of our journey, namely, to
determine astronomically the course of that arm of the Orinoco which
falls into the Rio Negro, and of which the existence has been
alternately proved and denied during half a century. In proportion as
we draw near to an object we have long had in view, its interest seems
to augment. The uninhabited banks of the Cassiquiare, covered with
forests, without memorials of times past, then occupied my
imagination, as do now the banks of the Euphrates, or the Oxus,
celebrated in the annals of civilized nations. In that interior part
of the New Continent one may almost accustom oneself to regard men as
not being essential to the order of nature. The earth is loaded with
plants, and nothing impedes their free development.
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