The Inhabitants Of Encaramada Then Showed The Spanish Soldiers The Way By The Rio Manapiari,* Which Falls Into The Ventuari. (* Between Encaramada And The Rio Manapiare, Don Miguel Sanchez, Chief Of This Little Expedition, Crossed The Rio Guainaima, Which Flows Into The Cuchivero.

Sanchez died, from the fatigue of this journey, on the borders of the Ventuari.) By descending these two rivers, the Orinoco and the Atabapo may be reached without passing the great cataracts, which present almost insurmountable obstacles to the conveyance of cattle.

The spirit of enterprise which had so eminently distinguished the Castilians at the period of the discovery of America, was again roused for a time in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Ferdinand VI was desirous of knowing the true limits of his vast possessions; and in the forests of Guiana, that land of fiction and fabulous tradition, the wily Indians revived the chimerical idea of the wealth of El Dorado, which had so much occupied the imagination of the first conquerors.

Amidst the mountains of Encaramada, which, like most coarse-grained granite rocks, are destitute of metallic veins, we cannot help inquiring whence came those grains of gold which Juan Martinez* (* The companion of Diego Ordaz.) and Raleigh profess to have seen in such abundance in the hands of the Indians of the Orinoco. From what I observed in that part of America, I am led to think that gold, like tin,* is sometimes disseminated in an almost imperceptible manner in the very mass of granite rocks, without our being able to perceive that there is a ramification and an intertwining of small veins.

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