Charlotte M. Yonge - "My Young Alcides"

William Godwin - "Lives of the Necromancers"

T. S. Arthur - "Home Lights and Shadows"

Edna St. Vincent Millay - "The Lamp and the Bell"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Equinoctial Regions of America V2

A >> Alexander von Humboldt >> Equinoctial Regions of America V2




We left the mission of Esmeralda on the 23rd of May. Without being
positively ill, we felt ourselves in a state of languor and weakness,
caused by the torment of insects, bad food, and a long voyage, in
narrow and damp boats. We did not go up the Orinoco beyond the mouth
of the Rio Guapo, which we should have done, if we could have
attempted to reach the sources of the river. There remains a distance
of fifteen leagues from the Guapo to the Raudal of the Guaharibos. At
this cataract, which is passed on a bridge of lianas, Indians are
posted armed with bows and arrows to prevent the whites, or those who
come from their territory from advancing westward. How could we hope
to pass a point where the commander of the Rio Negro, Don Francisco
Bovadilla, was stopped when, accompanied by his soldiers, he tried to
penetrate beyond the Gehette?* (* See above.) The carnage then made
among the natives has rendered them more distrustful, and more averse
to the inhabitants of the missions. It must be remembered that the
Orinoco had hitherto offered to geographers two distinct problems,
alike important, the situation of its sources, and the mode of its
communication with the Amazon. The latter problem formed the object of
the journey which I have described; with respect to the discovery of
its sources, that remains to be done by the Spanish and Portuguese
governments.

Our canoe was not ready to receive us till near three o'clock in the
afternoon. It had been filled with innumerable swarms of ants during
the navigation of the Cassiquiare; and the toldo, or roof of
palm-leaves, beneath which we were again doomed to remain stretched
out during twenty-two days, was with difficulty cleared of these
insects. We employed part of the morning in repeating to the
inhabitants of Esmeralda the questions we had already put to them,
respecting the existence of a lake towards the east. We showed copies
of the maps of Surville and La Cruz to old soldiers, who had been
posted in the mission ever since its first establishment. They laughed
at the supposed communication of the Orinoco with the Rio Idapa, and
at the White Sea, which the former river was represented to cross.
What we politely call geographical fictions they termed lies of the
old world (mentiras de por alla). These good people could not
comprehend how men, in making the map of a country which they had
never visited, could pretend to know things in minute detail, of which
persons who lived on the spot were ignorant. The lake Parima, the
Sierra Mey, and the springs which separate at the point where they
issue from the earth, were entirely unknown at Esmeralda. We were
repeatedly assured that no one had ever been to the east of the Raudal
of the Guaharibos; and that beyond that point, according to the
opinion of some of the natives, the Orinoco descends like a small
torrent from a group of mountains, inhabited by the Coroto Indians.
Father Gili, who was living on the banks of the Orinoco when the
expedition of the boundaries arrived, says expressly that Don
Apollinario Diez was sent in 1765 to attempt the discovery of the
source of the Orinoco; that he found the river, east of Esmeralda,
full of shoals; that he returned for want of provision; and that he
learned nothing, absolutely nothing, of the existence of a lake. This
statement perfectly accords with what I heard myself thirty-five years
later at Esmeralda. The probability of a fact is powerfully shaken
when it can be proved to be totally unknown on the very spot where it
ought to be known best; and when those by whom the existence of the
lake is affirmed contradict each other, not in the least essential
circumstances, but in all that are the most important.

When travellers judge only by their own sensations they differ from
each other respecting the abundance of the mosquitos as they do
respecting the progressive increase or diminution of the temperature.
The state of our organs, the motion of the air, its degree of humidity
or dryness, its electric intensity, a thousand circumstances
contribute at once to make us suffer more or less from the heat and
the insects. My fellow travellers were unanimously of opinion that
Esmeralda was more tormented by mosquitos than the banks of the
Cassiquiare, and even more than the two missions of the Great
Cataracts; whilst I, less sensible than they of the high temperature
of the air, thought that the irritation produced by the insects was
somewhat less at Esmeralda than at the entrance of the Upper Orinoco.
On hearing the complaints that are made of these tormenting insects in
hot countries it is difficult to believe that their absence, or rather
their sudden disappearance, could become a subject of inquietude; yet
such is the fact. The inhabitants of Esmeralda related to us, that in
the year 1795, an hour before sunset, when the mosquitos usually form
a very thick cloud, the air was observed to be suddenly free from
them. During the space of twenty minutes, not one insect was
perceived, although the sky was cloudless, and no wind announced rain.
It is necessary to have lived in those countries to comprehend the
degree of surprise which the sudden disappearance of the insects must
have produced. The inhabitants congratulated each other, and inquired
whether this state of happiness, this relief from pain (feicidad y
alivio), could be of any duration. But soon, instead of enjoying the
present, they yielded to chimerical fears, and imagined that the order
of nature was perverted. Some old Indians, the sages of the place,
asserted that the disappearance of the insects must be the precursor
of a great earthquake. Warm discussions arose; the least noise amid
the foliage of the trees was listened to with an attentive ear; and
when the air was again filled with mosquitos they were almost hailed
with pleasure. We could not guess what modification of the atmosphere
had caused this phenomenon, which must not be confounded with the
periodical replacing of one species of insects by another.

After four hours' navigation down the Orinoco we arrived at the point
of the bifurcation. Our resting place was on the same beach of the
Cassiquiare, where a few days previously our great dog had, as we
believe, been carried off by the jaguars. All the endeavours of the
Indians to discover any traces of the animal were fruitless. The cries
of the jaguars were heard during the whole night.* (* This frequency
of large jaguars is somewhat remarkable in a country destitute of
cattle. The tigers of the Upper Orinoco are far less bountifully
supplied with prey than those of the Pampas of Buenos Ayres and the
Llanos of Caracas, which are covered with herds of cattle. More than
four thousand jaguars are killed annually in the Spanish colonies,
several of them equalling the mean size of the royal tiger of Asia.
Two thousand skins of jaguars were formerly exported annually from
Buenos Ayres alone.) These animals are very frequent in the tracts
situated between the Cerro Maraguaca, the Unturan, and the banks of
the Pamoni. There also is found that black species of tiger* of which
I saw some fine skins at Esmeralda. (* Gmelin, in his Synonyma, seems
to confound this animal, under the name of Felis discolor, with the
great American lion (Felis concolor) which is very different from the
puma of the Andes of Quito.) This animal is celebrated for its
strength and ferocity; it appears to be still larger than the common
jaguar. The black spots are scarcely visible on the dark-brown ground
of its skin. The Indians assert, that these tigers are very rare, that
they never mingle with the common jaguars, and that they form another
race. I believe that Prince Maximilian of Neuwied, who has enriched
American zoology by so many important observations, acquired the same
information farther to the south, in the hot part of Brazil. Albino
varieties of the jaguar have been seen in Paraguay: for the spots of
these animals, which may be called the beautiful panthers of America,
are sometimes so pale as to be scarcely distinguishable on a very
white ground. In the black jaguars, on the contrary, it is the colour
of the ground which renders the spots indistinct. It requires to
reside long in those countries, and to accompany the Indians of
Esmeralda in the perilous chase of the tiger, to decide with certainty
upon the varieties and the species. In all the mammiferae, and
particularly in the numerous family of the apes, we ought, I believe,
to fix our attention less on the transition from one colour to another
in individuals, than on their habit of separating themselves, and
forming distinct bands.

We left our resting place before sunrise on the 24th of May. In a
rocky cove, which had been the dwelling of some Durimundi Indians, the
aromatic odour of the plants was so powerful, that although sleeping
in the open air, and the irritability of our nervous system being
allayed by the habits of a life of fatigue, we were nevertheless
incommoded by it. We could not ascertain the flowers which diffused
this perfume. The forest was impenetrable; but M. Bonpland believed
that large clumps of pancratium and other liliaceous plants were
concealed in the neighbouring marshes. Descending the Orinoco by
favour of the current, we passed first the mouth of the Rio
Cunucunumo, and then the Guanami and the Puriname. The two banks of
the principal river are entirely desert; lofty mountains rise on the
north, and on the south a vast plain extends far as the eye can reach
beyond the sources of the Atacavi, which lower down takes the name of
the Atabapo. There is something gloomy and desolate in this aspect of
a river, on which not even a fisherman's canoe is seen. Some
independent tribes, the Abirianos and the Maquiritares, dwell in the
mountainous country; but in the neighbouring savannahs,* bounded by
the Cassiquiare, the Atabapo, the Orinoco, and the Rio Negro, there is
now scarcely any trace of a human habitation. (* They form a
quadrilateral plot of a thousand square leagues, the opposite sides of
which have contrary slopes, the Cassiquiare flowing towards the south,
the Atabapo towards the north, the Orinoco towards the north-west, and
the Rio Negro towards the south-east.) I say now; for here, as in
other parts of Guiana, rude figures representing the sun, the moon,
and different animals, traced on the hardest rocks of granite, attest
the anterior existence of a people, very different from those who
became known to us on the banks of the Orinoco. According to the
accounts of the natives, and of the most intelligent missionaries,
these symbolic signs resemble perfectly the characters we saw a
hundred leagues more to the north, near Caycara, opposite the mouth of
the Rio Apure. (See Chapter 2.18 above.)

In advancing from the plains of the Cassiquiare and the Conorichite,
one hundred and forty leagues further eastward, between the sources of
the Rio Blanco and the Rio Essequibo, we also meet with rocks and
symbolical figures. I have lately verified this curious fact, which is
recorded in the journal of the traveller Hortsman, who went up the
Rupunuvini, one of the tributary streams of the Essequibo. Where this
river, full of small cascades, winds between the mountains of
Macarana, he found, before he reached lake Amucu, rocks covered with
figures, or (as he says in Portuguese) with varias letras. We must not
take this word letters in its real signification. We were also shewn,
near the rock Culimacari, on the banks of the Cassiquiare, and at the
port of Caycara in the Lower Orinoco, traces which were believed to be
regular characters. They were however only misshapen figures,
representing the heavenly bodies, together with tigers, crocodiles,
boas, and instruments used for making the flour of cassava. It was
impossible to recognize in these painted rocks* (the name by which the
natives denote those masses loaded with figures) any symmetrical
arrangement, or characters with regular spaces. (* In Tamanac
tepumereme. (Tepu, a stone, rock; as in Mexican, tetl, a stone, and
tepetl, a mountain; in Turco-Tatarian, tepe.) The Spanish Americans
also call the rock covered with sculptured figures, piedras pintadas;
those for instance, which are found on the summit of the Paramo of
Guanacas, in New Grenada, and which recall to mind the tepumereme of
the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rupunuvini.) The traces
discovered in the mountains of Uruana, by the missionary Fray Ramon
Bueno, approach nearer to alphabetical writing; but are nevertheless
very doubtful.

Whatever may be the meaning of these figures, and with whatever view
they were traced upon granite, they merit the examination of those who
direct their attention to the philosophic history of our species. In
travelling from the coast of Caracas towards the equator, we are at
first led to believe that monuments of this kind are peculiar to the
mountain-chain of Encaramada; they are found at the port of Sedeno,
near Caycara,* (* In the Mountains of the Tyrant, Cerros del Tirano.)
at San Rafael del Capuchino, opposite Cabruta, and in almost every
place where the granitic rock pierces the soil, in the savannah which
extends from the Cerro Curiquima towards the banks of the Caura. The
nations of the Tamanac race, the ancient inhabitants of those
countries, have a local mythology, and traditions connected with these
sculptured rocks. Amalivaca, the father of the Tamanacs, that is, the
creator of the human race (for every nation regards itself as the root
of all other nations), arrived in a bark, at the time of the great
inundation, which is called the age of water,* when the billows of the
ocean broke against the mountains of Encaramada in the interior of the
land. (* The Atonatiuh of the Mexicans, the fourth age, the fourth
regeneration of the world.) All mankind, or, to speak more correctly,
all the Tamanacs, were drowned, with the exception of one man and one
woman, who saved themselves on a mountain near the banks of the
Asiveru, called Cuchivero by the Spaniards. This mountain is the
Ararat of the Aramean or Semitic nations, and the Tlaloc or Colhuacan
of the Mexicans. Amalivaca, sailing in his bark, engraved the figures
of the moon and the sun on the Painted Rock (Tepumereme) of
Encaramada. Some blocks of granite piled upon one another, and forming
a kind of cavern, are still called the house or dwelling of the great
forefather of the Tamanacs. The natives show also a large stone near
this cavern, in the plains of Maita, which they say was an instrument
of music, the drum of Amalivaca. We must here observe, that this
heroic personage had a brother, Vochi, who helped him to give the
surface of the earth its present form. The Tamanacs relate that the
two brothers, in their system of perfectibility, sought, at first, to
arrange the Orinoco in such a manner, that the current of the water
could always be followed either going down or going up the river. They
hoped by this means to spare men trouble in navigating rivers; but,
however great the power of these regenerators of the world, they could
never contrive to give a double slope to the Orinoco, and were
compelled to relinquish this singular plan. Amalivaca had daughters,
who had a decided taste for travelling. The tradition states,
doubtless with a figurative meaning, that he broke their legs, to
render them sedentary, and force them to people the land of the
Tamanacs. After having regulated everything in America, on that side
of the great water, Amalivaca again embarked, and returned to the
other shore, to the same place from whence he came. Since the natives
have seen the missionaries arrive, they imagine that Europe is this
other shore; and one of them inquired with great simplicity of Father
Gili, whether he had there seen the great Amalivaca, the father of the
Tamanacs, who had covered the rocks with symbolic figures.

These notions of a great convulsion of nature; of two human beings
saved on the summit of a mountain, and casting behind them the fruits
of the mauritia palm-tree, to repeople the earth; of that national
divinity, Amalivaca, who arrived by water from a distant land, who
prescribed laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their
migrations; these various features of a very ancient system of belief,
are well worthy of attention. What the Tamanacs, and the tribes whose
languages are analogous to the Tamanac tongue, now relate to us, they
have no doubt learned from other people, who inhabited before them the
same regions. The name of Amalivaca is spread over a region of more
than five thousand square leagues; he is found designated as the
father of mankind, or our great grandfather, as far as to the Caribbee
nations, whose idiom approaches the Tamanac only in the same degree as
the German approaches the Greek, the Persian, and the Sanscrit.
Amalivaca is not originally the Great Spirit, the Aged of Heaven, the
invisible being, whose worship springs from that of the powers of
nature, when nations rise insensibly to the consciousness of the unity
of these powers; he is rather a personage of the heroic times, a man,
who, coming from afar, lived in the land of the Tamanacs and the
Caribs, sculptured symbolic figures upon the rocks, and disappeared by
going back to the country he had previously inhabited beyond the
ocean. The anthropomorphism of the divinity has two sources
diametrically opposite; and this opposition seems to arise less from
the various degrees of intellectual culture, than from the different
dispositions of nations, some of which are more inclined to mysticism,
and others more governed by the senses, and by external impressions.
Sometimes man makes the divinities descend upon earth, charging them
with the care of ruling nations, and giving them laws, as in the
fables of the East; sometimes, as among the Greeks and other nations
of the West, they are the first monarchs, priest-kings, who are
stripped of what is human in their nature, to be raised to the rank of
national divinities. Amalivaca was a stranger, like Manco-Capac,
Bochica, and Quetzalcohuatl; those extraordinary men, who, in the
alpine or civilized part of America, on the tablelands of Peru, New
Grenada, and Anahuac, organized civil society, regulated the order of
sacrifices, and founded religious congregations. The Mexican
Quetzalcohuatl, whose descendants Montezuma* (* The second king of
this name, of the race of Acamapitzin, properly called
Montezuma-Ilhuicamina.) thought he recognized in the companions of
Cortez, displays an additional resemblance to Amalivaca, the
mythologic personage of savage America or the plains of the torrid
zone. When advanced in age, the high-priest of Tula left the country
of Anahuac, which he had filled with his miracles, to return to an
unknown region, called Tlalpallan. When the monk Bernard de Sahagun
arrived in Mexico, the same questions were put to him, as those which
were addressed to Father Gili two hundred years later, in the forests
of the Orinoco; he was asked whether he came from the other shore (del
otro lado), from the countries to which Quetzalcohuatl had retired.

The region of sculptured rocks, or of painted stones, extends far
beyond the Lower Orinoco, beyond the country (latitude 7 degrees 5
minutes to 7 degrees 40 minutes, longitude 68 degrees 50 minutes to 69
degrees 45 minutes) to which belongs what may be called the local
fables of the Tamanacs. We again find these same sculptured rocks
between the Cassiquiare and the Atabapo (latitude 2 degrees 5 minutes
to 3 degrees 20 minutes; longitude 69 to 70 degrees); and between the
sources of the Essequibo and the Rio Branco (latitude 3 degrees 50
minutes; longitude 62 degrees 32 minutes). I do not assert that these
figures prove the knowledge of the use of iron, or that they denote a
very advanced degree of culture; but even on the supposition that,
instead of being symbolical, they are the fruits of the idleness of
hunting nations, we must still admit an anterior race of men, very
different from those who now inhabit the banks of the Orinoco and the
Rupunuri. The more a country is destitute of remembrances of
generations that are extinct, the more important it becomes to follow
the least traces of what appears to be monumental. The eastern plains
of North America display only those extraordinary circumvallations
that remind us of the fortified camps (the pretended cities of vast
extent) of the ancient and modern nomad tribes of Asia. In the
oriental plains of South America, the force of vegetation, the heat of
the climate, and the too lavish gifts of nature, have opposed
obstacles still more powerful to the progress of human civilization.
Between the Orinoco and the Amazon I heard no mention of any wall of
earth, vestige of a dyke, or sepulchral tumulus; the rocks alone show
us (and this through a great extent of country), rude sketches which
the hand of man has traced in times unknown, and which are connected
with religious traditions.

Before I quitted the wildest part of the Upper Orinoco, I thought it
desirable to mention facts which are important only when they are
considered in their connection with each other. All I could relate of
our navigation from Esmeralda to the mouth of the Atabapo would be
merely an enumeration of rivers and uninhabited places. From the 24th
to the 27th of May, we slept but twice on land; our first
resting-place was at the confluence of the Rio Jao, and our second
below the mission of Santa Barbara, in the island of Minisi. The
Orinoco being free from shoals, the Indian pilot pursued his course
all night, abandoning the boat to the current of the river. Setting
apart the time which we spent on the shore in preparing the rice and
plantains that served us for food, we took but thirty-five hours in
going from Esmeralda to Santa Barbara. The chronometer gave me for the
longitude of the latter mission 70 degrees 3 minutes; we had therefore
made near four miles an hour, a velocity which was partly owing to the
current, and partly to the action of the oars. The Indians assert that
the crocodiles do not go up the Orinoco above the mouth of the Rio
Jao, and that the manatees are not even found above the cataract of
Maypures.

The mission of Santa Barbara is situated a little to the west of the
mouth of the Rio Ventuari, or Venituari, examined in 1800 by Father
Francisco Valor. We found in this small village of one hundred and
twenty inhabitants some traces of industry; but the produce of this
industry is of little profit to the natives; it is reserved for the
monks, or, as they say in these countries, for the church and the
convent. We were assured that a great lamp of massive silver,
purchased at the expense of the neophytes, is expected from Madrid.
Let us hope that, after the arrival of this treasure, they will think
also of clothing the Indians, of procuring for them some instruments
of agriculture, and assembling their children in a school. Although
there are a few oxen in the savannahs round the mission, they are
rarely employed in turning the mill (trapiche), to express the juice
of the sugar-cane; this is the occupation of the Indians, who work
without pay here as they do everywhere when they are understood to
work for the church. The pasturages at the foot of the mountains round
Santa Barbara are not so rich as at Esmeralda, but superior to those
at San Fernando de Atabapo. The grass is short and thick, yet the
upper stratum of earth furnishes only a dry and parched granitic sand.
The savannahs (far from fertile) of the banks of the Guaviare, the
Meta, and the Upper Orinoco, are equally destitute of the mould which
abounds in the surrounding forests, and of the thick stratum of clay,
which covers the sandstone of the Llanos, or steppes of Venezuela. The
small herbaceous mimosas contribute in this zone to fatten the cattle,
but are very rare between the Rio Jao and the mouth of the Guaviare.

During the few hours of our stay at the mission of Santa Barbara, we
obtained pretty accurate ideas respecting the Rio Ventuari, which,
next to the Guaviare, appeared to me to be the most considerable
tributary of the Orinoco. Its banks, heretofore occupied by the
Maypures, are still peopled by a great number of independent nations.
On going up by the mouth of the Ventuari, which forms a delta covered
with palm-trees, you find in the east, after three days' journey, the
Cumaruita and the Paru, two streams that rise at the foot of the lofty
mountains of Cuneva. Higher up, on the west, lie the Mariata and the
Manipiare, inhabited by the Macos and Curacicanas. The latter nation
is remarkable for their active cultivation of cotton. In a hostile
incursion (entrada) a large house was found containing more than
thirty or forty hammocks of a very fine texture of spun cotton,
cordage, and fishing implements. The natives had fled; and Father
Valor informed us, that the Indians of the mission who accompanied him
had set fire to the house before he could save these productions of
the industry of the Curacicanas. The neophytes of Santa Barbara, who
think themselves very superior to these supposed savages, appeared to
me far less industrious. The Rio Manipiare, one of the principal
branches of the Ventuari, approaches near its source those lofty
mountains, the northern ridge of which gives birth to the Cuchivero.
It is a prolongation of the chain of Baraguan; and there Father Gili
places the table-land of Siamacu, of which he vaunts the temperate
climate. The upper course of the Rio Ventuari, beyond the confluence
of the Asisi, and the Great Raudales, is almost unknown. I was
informed only that the Upper Ventuari bends so much towards the east
that the ancient road from Esmeralda to the Rio Caura crosses the bed
of the river. The proximity of the tributary streams of the Carony,
the Caura, and the Ventuari, has facilitated for ages the access of
the Caribs to the banks of the Upper Orinoco. Bands of this warlike
and trading people went up from the Rio Carony, by the Paragua, to the
sources of the Paruspa. A portage conducted them to the Chavarro, an
eastern tributary stream of the Rio Caura; they descended with their
canoes first this stream, and then the Caura itself as far as the
mouth of the Erevato. After having gone up this last river south-west,
and traversed vast savannahs for three days, they entered by the
Manipiare into the great Rio Ventuari. I trace this road with
precision not only because it was that by which the traffic of native
slaves was carried on, but also to call the attention of those, who at
some future day may rule the destiny of Guiana, to the high importance
of this labyrinth of rivers.