The Discovery of Electricity at Calabozo

Mau

We couldn’t know which way the wind blew

by the time we got to Calabozo. Here
the sun only abates when it, ravenous
disappears under the plain horizon and

the soil expires fumes Bonpland measured

at 25° Celsius. The guide was a zambo
of bright, tired eyes and we had hoped
he could show us to the hacendados

but no one would take us—a German

and a francophone, letters dated at Ventôse.
Not since we bathed with slaves in shallow
ponds where cattle drank from and dead

crocodiles rotted at the shore. No

erastes in here, please! And yet
having never left the town, Carlos del
Pozo took us to his ersatz house

where dissembled laid a pile strung

with great discs, electrophori, batteries
and electrometers as complete as any
in the old continent. Never having

read Volta or Galvani I still felt

delight when our metals jerked
a frog’s leg, still incredulous at the truths
of the natural source of electromagnetism—

which is what we came for. Outside Calabozo

the sporadic ponds and rivers hide
water eels buried in mud which no creole
or indian get near. I don’t remember

what convinced them or whom. ‘Herr Humboldt,

have here thirty acclimatised horses
at your disposal.’ So by morning
we cut through retreating mimosas with

fragrant flowers and clusia shrubs, arrived

at the torrid pond and the indians
placed themselves around it. On Bonpland’s
order all the horses swell into
the pond. An extraordinary noise of
horses planting their legs on electric
eels, the indians spearing those that
escape back into the pond. Some horses

expiring under the almost vertical sun

and more still splayed under the coiling
creatures, breathless in combat. Until their point
of exhaustion when we—with our bare

hands can reel them onto dry soil.

These cannot possibly be spoils but
they could be what we came for. At midday
cattle here is locked in pens under the

boil, and farmhands release them half

dead, olfactory sense for water
enhanced. Under a sun which likely blows hot
with electrical phenomena they find something to drink.