Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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According To The
Accounts Of The Natives, And Of The Most Intelligent Missionaries,
These Symbolic Signs Resemble Perfectly The Characters We Saw A
Hundred Leagues More To The North, Near Caycara, Opposite The Mouth Of
The Rio Apure.
(See Chapter 2.18 above.)
In advancing from the plains of the Cassiquiare and the Conorichite,
one hundred and forty leagues further eastward, between the sources of
the Rio Blanco and the Rio Essequibo, we also meet with rocks and
symbolical figures. I have lately verified this curious fact, which is
recorded in the journal of the traveller Hortsman, who went up the
Rupunuvini, one of the tributary streams of the Essequibo. Where this
river, full of small cascades, winds between the mountains of
Macarana, he found, before he reached lake Amucu, rocks covered with
figures, or (as he says in Portuguese) with varias letras. We must not
take this word letters in its real signification. We were also shewn,
near the rock Culimacari, on the banks of the Cassiquiare, and at the
port of Caycara in the Lower Orinoco, traces which were believed to be
regular characters. They were however only misshapen figures,
representing the heavenly bodies, together with tigers, crocodiles,
boas, and instruments used for making the flour of cassava. It was
impossible to recognize in these painted rocks* (the name by which the
natives denote those masses loaded with figures) any symmetrical
arrangement, or characters with regular spaces. (* In Tamanac
tepumereme. (Tepu, a stone, rock; as in Mexican, tetl, a stone, and
tepetl, a mountain; in Turco-Tatarian, tepe.) The Spanish Americans
also call the rock covered with sculptured figures, piedras pintadas;
those for instance, which are found on the summit of the Paramo of
Guanacas, in New Grenada, and which recall to mind the tepumereme of
the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rupunuvini.) The traces
discovered in the mountains of Uruana, by the missionary Fray Ramon
Bueno, approach nearer to alphabetical writing; but are nevertheless
very doubtful.
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