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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Throughout This Course The Orinoco
Continues To Be Three Or Four Hundred Toises Broad.
The tributary
streams are most frequent on the right bank, because on that side the
river is bounded by
The lofty cloud-capped mountains of Duida and
Maraguaca, while the left bank on the contrary is low and contiguous
to a plain, the general slope of which inclines to the south-west. The
northern Cordilleras are covered with fine timber. The growth of
plants is so enormous in this hot and constantly humid climate, that
the trunks of the Bombax ceiba are sixteen feet in diameter. From the
mouth of the Rio Padamo, which is of considerable breadth, the Indians
arrive, in a day and a half, at the Rio Mavaca. The latter takes its
rise in the lofty mountains of Unturan, and communicates with a lake,
on the banks of which the Portuguese* of the Rio Negro gather the
aromatic seeds of the Laurus pucheri, known in trade by the names of
the pichurim bean, and toda specie. (* The pichurim bean is the
puchiri of La Condamine, which abounds at the Rio Xingu, a tributary
stream of the Amazon, and on the banks of the Hyurubaxy, or Yurubesh,
which runs into the Rio Negro. The puchery, or pichurim, which is
grated like nutmeg, differs from another aromatic fruit (a laurel?)
known in trade at Grand Para by the names of cucheri, cuchiri, or
cravo (clavus) do Maranhao, and which, on account of its odour, is
compared with cloves.) Between the confluence of the Padamo and that
of the Mavaca, the Orinoco receives on the north the Ocamo, into which
the Rio Matacona falls.
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