If The Configuration Of The Grottoes, The Splendour Of The Stalactites, And All The Phenomena Of Inorganic Nature, Present Striking Analogies, The Majesty Of Equinoctial Vegetation Gives At The Same Time An Individual Character To The Aperture Of The Cavern.

The Cueva del Guacharo is pierced in the vertical profile of a rock.

The entrance is towards the south, and forms an arch eighty feet broad and seventy-two high. The rock which surmounts the grotto is covered with trees of gigantic height. The mammee-tree and the genipa,* (* Caruto, Genipa americana. The flower at Caripe, has sometimes five, sometimes six stamens.) with large and shining leaves, raise their branches vertically towards the sky; whilst those of the courbaril and the erythrina form, as they extend, a thick canopy of verdure. Plants of the family of pothos, with succulent stems, oxalises, and orchideae of a singular structure,* (* A dendrobium, with a gold-coloured flower, spotted with black, three inches long.) rise in the driest clefts of the rocks; while creeping plants waving in the winds are interwoven in festoons before the opening of the cavern. We distinguished in these festoons a bignonia of a violet blue, the purple dolichos, and for the first time, that magnificent solandra,* (* Solandra scandens. It is the gousaticha of the Chayma Indians.) which has an orange-coloured flower and a fleshy tube more than four inches long.

But this luxury of vegetation embellishes not only the external arch, it appears even in the vestibule of the grotto. We saw with astonishment plantain-leaved heliconias eighteen feet high, the praga palm-tree, and arborescent arums, following the course of the river, even to those subterranean places. The vegetation continues in the cave of Caripe as in those deep crevices of the Andes, half-excluded from the light of day, and does not disappear till, penetrating into the interior, we advance thirty or forty paces from the entrance. We measured the way by means of a cord; and we went on about four hundred and thirty feet without being obliged to light our torches. Daylight penetrates far into this region, because the grotto forms but one single channel, keeping the same direction, from south-east to north-west. Where the light began to fail, we heard from afar the hoarse sounds of the nocturnal birds; sounds which the natives think belong exclusively to those subterraneous places.

The guacharo is of the size of our fowls. It has the mouth of the goat-suckers and procnias, and the port of those vultures whose crooked beaks are surrounded with stiff silky hairs. Suppressing, with M. Cuvier, the order of picae, we must refer this extraordinary bird to the passeres, the genera of which are connected with each other by almost imperceptible transitions. It forms a new genus, very different from the goatsucker, in the loudness of its voice, in the vast strength of its beak (containing a double tooth), and in its feet without the membranes which unite the anterior phalanges of the claws.

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