Jules Verne by Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon Read Free Book Online

lose
themselves in the Atlantic Ocean eight hundred leagues away.
    "And the river which carries to the sea the largest volume of water,"
replied Manoel.
    "A volume so considerable," added Benito, "that it freshens the sea
water for an immense distance from its mouth, and the force of whose
current is felt by ships at eight leagues from the coast."
    "A river whose course is developed over more than thirty degrees of
latitude."
    "And in a basin which from south to north does not comprise less than
twenty-five degrees."
    "A basin!" exclaimed Benito. "Can you call it a basin, the vast plain
through which it runs, the savannah which on all sides stretches out of
sight, without a hill to give a gradient, without a mountain to bound
the horizon?"
    "And along its whole extent," continued Manoel, "like the thousand
tentacles of some gigantic polyp, two hundred tributaries, flowing from
north or south, themselves fed by smaller affluents without number, by
the side of which the large rivers of Europe are but petty streamlets."
    "And in its course five hundred and sixty islands, without counting
islets, drifting or stationary, forming a kind of archipelago, and
yielding of themselves the wealth of a kingdom!"
    "And along its flanks canals, lagoons, and lakes, such as cannot be met
with even in Switzerland, Lombardy, Scotland, or Canada."
    "A river which, fed by its myriad tributaries, discharges into the
Atlantic over two hundred and fifty millions of cubic meters of water
every hour."
    "A river whose course serves as the boundary of two republics, and
sweeps majestically across the largest empire of South America, as if it
were, in very truth, the Pacific Ocean itself flowing out along its own
canal into the Atlantic."
    "And what a mouth! An arm of the sea in which one island, Marajo, has a
circumference of more than five hundred leagues!"
    "And whose waters the ocean does not pond back without raising in a
strife which is phenomenal, a tide-race, or
'pororoca,'
to which the
ebbs, the bores, and the eddies of other rivers are but tiny ripples
fanned up by the breeze."
    "A river which three names are scarcely enough to distinguish, and which
ships of heavy tonnage, without any change in their cargoes, can ascend
for more than three thousand miles from its mouth."
    "A river which, by itself, its affluents, and subsidiary streams,
opens a navigable commercial route across the whole of the south of
the continent, passing from the Magdalena to the Ortequazza, from the
Ortequazza to the Caqueta, from the Caqueta to the Putumayo, from the
Putumayo to the Amazon! Four thousand miles of waterway, which only
require a few canals to make the network of navigation complete!"
    "In short, the biggest and most admirable river system which we have in
the world."
    The two young men were speaking in a kind of frenzy of their
incomparable river. They were themselves children of this great
Amazon, whose affluents, well worthy of itself, from the highways which
penetrate Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, New Grenada, Venezuela, and the four
Guianas—English, French, Dutch and Brazilian.
    What nations, what races, has it seen whose origin is lost in the
far-distant past! It is one of the largest rivers of the globe. Its true
source still baffles our explorers. Numbers of States still claim
the honor of giving it birth. The Amazon was not likely to escape the
inevitable fate, and Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia have for years disputed
as to the honor of its glorious paternity.
    To-day, however, there seems to be little doubt but that the Amazon
rises in Peru, in the district of Huaraco, in the department of Tarma,
and that it starts from the Lake of Lauricocha, which is situated
between the eleventh and twelfth degree of south latitude.
    Those who make the river rise in Bolivia, and descend form the mountains
of Titicaca, have to prove that the true Amazon is the Ucayali, which is
formed by the junction of the Paro and the Apurimac—an assertion which
is now generally