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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They Possessed Amulets, Little
Idols Of Molten Gold, And Chairs, Elegantly Carved; But These Traces
Of Dawning Civilization Are Far Distant From Those Cities And Houses
Of Stone Described By Raleigh And Those Who Followed Him.
We have made
drawings of some ruins of great edifices east of the Cordilleras, when
going down from Loxa towards the Amazon, in the province of Jaen de
Bracamoros; and thus far the Incas had carried their arms, their
religion, and their arts.
The inhabitants of the Orinoco were also,
before the conquest, when abandoned to themselves, somewhat more
civilized than the independent hordes of our days. They had populous
villages along the river, and a regular trade with more southern
nations; but nothing indicates that they ever constructed an edifice
of stone. We saw no vestige of any during the course of our journey.
Though the celebrity of the riches of Spanish Guiana is chiefly
assignable to the geographical situation of the country and the errors
of the old maps, we are not justified in denying the existence of any
auriferous land in the tract of country of eighty-two thousand square
leagues, which stretches between the Orinoco and the Amazon, on the
east of the Andes of Quito and New Granada. What I saw of this country
between the second and eighth degrees of latitude, and the sixty-sixth
and seventy-first degrees of longitude, is entirely composed of
granite, and of a gneiss passing into micaceous and talcous slate.
These rocks appear naked in the lofty mountains of Parima, as well as
in the plains of the Atabapo and the Cassiquiare.
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