Geoscience Reference
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fears of the natives: but, as soon as his wish is gratified, he is terror-stricken,
and is involuntarily prompted to seek safety in flight.
Tschudi's description exposed european hubris in a manner perhaps inspired
by Humboldt himself. But Humboldt could not agree with it completely:
This impression is not, in my opinion, the result of a recollection of those
fearful pictures of devastation presented to our imaginations by the historical
narratives of the past, but is rather due to
the sudden revelation of the delusive
nature
of the inherent faith by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of
the solid parts of the earth.
We are accustomed from early childhood to draw
a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on
which we tread; and this feeling is confirmed by the evidence of our senses.
When, therefore, we suddenly feel the ground move beneath us, a mysterious
and natural force, with which we are previously unacquainted, is revealed to
us as an active disturbance of stability. A moment destroys the illusion of a
whole life; our deceptive faith in the repose of nature vanishes, and we feel
transported, as it were, into a realm of unknown destructive forces. every
sound—the faintest motion in the air—arrests our attention, and we no
longer trust the ground on which we stand. Animals, especially dogs and
swine, participate in the same anxious disquietude; and even the crocodiles of
the Orinoco, which are at other times as dumb as our little lizards, leave the
trembling bed of the river, and run with loud cries into the adjacent forests.
To man the earthquake conveys an idea of some universal and unlimited
danger. We may flee from the crater of a volcano in active eruption, or from
the dwelling whose destruction is threatened by the approach of the lava
stream; but in an earthquake, direct our flight whithersoever we will, we still
feel as if we trod upon the very focus of destruction. This condition of the
mind is not of long duration, although it takes its origin in the deepest re-
cesses of our nature; and when a series of faint shocks succeed one another,
the inhabitants of the country soon lose every trace of fear.
31
Humboldt himself had experienced this transformation, becoming, by the
end of his five-year journey through the Americas, a veritable earthquake afi-
cionado. With greater familiarity came greater admiration for the resilience
of the native South Americans in the face of the “incredible instability of
nature.”
32
in his
Personal Narrative,
he recalled being awed by the “extraor-
dinary” “presence of mind” of a native woman during an earthquake. When
asked how she remained so calm, she “answered with great simplicity”: “i
