It Rises In The Midst Of The Plain, And Has Less Resemblance To A Tumulus Than To Those Masses Of Granitic Stone, Which In North Holland And Germany Bear The Name Of Hunenbette, Beds (Or Tombs) Of Heroes.

The shore, at this part of the Orinoco, is no longer of pure and quartzose sand; but is composed of clay and spangles of mica, deposited in very thin strata, and generally at an inclination of forty or fifty degrees.

It looks like decomposed mica-slate. This change in the geological configuration of the shore extends far beyond the mouth of the Apure. We had begun to observe it in this latter river as far off as Algodonal and the Cano del Manati. The spangles of mica come, no doubt, from the granite mountains of Curiquima and Encaramada; since further north-east we find only quartzose sand, sandstone, compact limestone, and gypsum. Alluvial earth carried successively from south to north need not surprise us in the Orinoco; but to what shall we attribute the same phenomenon in the bed of the Apure, seven leagues west of its mouth? In the present state of things, notwithstanding the swellings of the Orinoco, the waters of the Apure never retrograde so far; and, to explain this phenomenon, we are forced to admit that the micaceous strata were deposited at a time when the whole of the very low country lying between Caycara, Algodonal, and the mountains of Encaramada, formed the basin of an inland lake.

We stopped some time at the port of Encaramada, which is a sort of embarcadero, a place where boats assemble. A rock of forty or fifty feet high forms the shore. It is composed of blocks of granite, heaped one upon another, as at the Schneeberg in Franconia, and in almost all the granitic mountains of Europe. Some of these detached masses have a spheroidal form; they are not balls with concentric layers, but merely rounded blocks, nuclei separated from their envelopes by the effect of decomposition. This granite is of a greyish lead-colour, often black, as if covered with oxide of manganese; but this colour does not penetrate one fifth of a line into the rock, which is of a reddish white colour within, coarse-grained, and destitute of hornblende.

The Indian names of the Mission of San Luis del Encaramada, are Guaja and Caramana.* (* All the Missions of South America have names composed of two words, the first of which is necessarily the name of a saint, the patron of the church, and the second an Indian name, that of the nation, or the spot where the establishment is placed. Thus we say, San Jose de Maypures, Santa Cruz de Cachipo, San Juan Nepomuceno de los Atures, etc. These compound names appear only in official documents; the Inhabitants adopt but one of the two names, and generally, provided it be sonorous, the Indian. As the names of saints are several times repeated in neighbouring places, great confusion in geography arises from these repetitions.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 139 of 406
Words from 72021 to 72526 of 211397