Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.2 — Chapter 2.17, Part 1

CHAPTER 2.

17. MOUNTAINS WHICH SEPARATE THE VALLEYS OF ARAGUA FROM THE LLANOS OF CARACAS.

VILLA DE CURA.

PARAPARA.

LLANOS OR STEPPES.

CALABOZO.

The chain of mountains, bordering the lake of Tacarigua towards the south, forms in some sort the northern shore of the great basin of the Llanos or savannahs of Caracas.

To descend from the valleys of Aragua into these savannahs, it is necessary to cross the mountains of Guigue and of Tucutunemo.

From a peopled country embellished by cultivation, we plunge into a vast solitude.

Accustomed to the aspect of rocks, and to the shade of valleys, the traveller beholds with astonishment these savannahs without trees, these immense plains, which seem to ascend to the horizon.

Before I trace the scenery of the Llanos, or of the region of pasturage, I will briefly describe the road we took from Nueva Valencia, by Villa de Cura and San Juan, to the little village of Ortiz, at the entrance of the steppes.

We left the valleys of Aragua on the 6th of March before sunrise.

We passed over a plain richly cultivated, keeping along the south-west side of the lake of Valencia, and crossing the ground left uncovered by the waters of the lake.

We were never weary of admiring the fertility of the soil, covered with calabashes, water-melons, and plantains.

The rising of the sun was announced by the distant noise of the howling monkeys.

Approaching a group of trees, which rise in the midst of the plain, between those parts which were anciently the islets of Don Pedro and La Negra, we saw numerous bands of araguatos moving as in procession and very slowly, from one tree to another.

A male was followed by a great number of females; several of the latter carrying their young on their shoulders.

The howling monkeys, which live in society in different parts of America, everywhere resemble each other in their manners, though the species are not always the same.

The uniformity with which the araguatos* (* Simia ursina.

) perform their movements is extremely striking.

Whenever the branches of neighbouring trees do not touch each other, the male who leads the party suspends himself by the callous and prehensile part of his tail; and, letting fall the rest of his body, swings himself till in one of his oscillations he reaches the neighbouring branch.

The whole file performs the same movements on the same spot.

It is almost superfluous to add how dubious is the assertion of Ulloa, and so many otherwise well-informed travellers, according to whom, the marimondos,* (* Simia belzebuth.

) the araguatos, and other monkeys with a prehensile tail, form a sort of chain, in order to reach the opposite side of a river.

* (* Ulloa has not hesitated to represent in an engraving this extraordinary feat of the monkeys with a prehensile tail.

--See Viage a la America Meridional, Madrid 1748. ) We had opportunities, during five years, of observing thousands of these animals; and for this very reason we place no confidence in statements possibly invented by the Europeans themselves, though repeated by the Indians of the Missions, as if they had been transmitted to them by their fathers.

Man, the most remote from civilization, enjoys the astonishment he excites in recounting the marvels of his country.

He says he has seen what he imagines may have been seen by others.

Every savage is a hunter, and the stories of hunters borrow from the imagination in proportion as the animals, of which they boast the artifices, are endowed with a high degree of intelligence.

Hence arise the fictions of which foxes, monkeys, crows, and the condor of the Andes, have been the subjects in both hemispheres.

The araguatos are accused of sometimes abandoning their young, that they may be lighter for flight when pursued by the Indian hunters.

It is said that mothers have been seen removing their young from their shoulders, and throwing them down to the foot of the tree.

I am inclined to believe that a movement merely accidental has been mistaken for one premeditated.

The Indians have a dislike and a predilection for certain races of monkeys; they love the viuditas, the titis, and generally all the little sagoins; while the araguatos, on account of their mournful aspect, and their uniform howling, are at once detested and abused.

In reflecting on the causes that may facilitate the propagation of sound in the air during the night, I thought it important to determine with precision the distance at which, especially in damp and stormy weather, the howling of a band of araguatos is heard.

I believe I obtained proof of its being distinguished at eight hundred toises distance.

The monkeys which are furnished with four hands cannot make excursions in the Llanos; and it is easy, amidst vast plains covered with grass, to recognize a solitary group of trees, whence the noise proceeds, and which is inhabited by howling monkeys.

Now, by approaching or withdrawing from this group of trees, the maximum of the distance may be measured, at which the howling is heard.

These distances appeared to me sometimes one-third greater during the night, especially when the weather was cloudy, very hot, and humid.

The Indians pretend that when the araguatos fill the forests with their howling, there is always one that chaunts as leader of the chorus.

The observation is pretty accurate.

During a long interval one solitary and strong voice is generally distinguished, till its place is taken by another voice of a different pitch.

We may observe from time to time the same instinct of imitation among frogs, and almost all animals which live together and exert their voices in union.

The Missionaries further assert, that, when a female among the araguatos is on the point of bringing forth, the choir suspends its howlings till the moment of the birth of the young.

I could not myself judge of the accuracy of this assertion; but I do not believe it to be entirely unfounded.

I have observed that, when an extraordinary incident, the moans for instance of a wounded araguato, fixed the attention of the band, the howlings were for some minutes suspended.

Our guides assured us gravely, that, to cure an asthma, it is sufficient to drink out of the bony drum of the hyoidal bone of the araguato.

This animal having so extraordinary a volume of voice, it is supposed that its larynx must necessarily impart to the water poured into it the virtue of curing affections of the lungs.

Such is the science of the vulgar, which sometimes resembles that of the ancients.

We passed the night at the village of Guigue, the latitude of which I found by observations of Canopus to be 10 degrees 4 minutes 11 seconds.

The village, surrounded with the richest cultivation, is only a thousand toises distant from the lake of Tacarigua.

We lodged with an old sergeant, a native of Murcia, a man of a very original character.

To prove to us that he had studied among the Jesuits, he recited the history of the creation of the world in Latin.

He knew the names of Augustus, Tiberius, and Diocletian; and while enjoying the agreeable coolness of the nights in an enclosure planted with bananas, he employed himself in reading all that related to the courts of the Roman emperors.

He inquired of us with earnestness for a remedy for the gout, from which he suffered severely.

"I know," said he, "a Zambo of Valencia, a famous curioso, who could cure me; but the Zambo would expect to be treated with attentions which I cannot pay to a man of his colour, and I prefer remaining as I am."

On leaving Guigue we began to ascend the chain of mountains, extending on the south of the lake towards Guacimo and La Palma.

From the top of a table-land, at three hundred and twenty toises of elevation, we saw for the last time the valleys of Aragua.

The gneiss appeared uncovered, presenting the same direction of strata, and the same dip towards the north-west.

Veins of quartz, that traverse the gneiss, are auriferous; and hence the neighbouring ravine bears the name of Quebrada del Oro.

We heard with surprise at every step the name of "ravine of gold," in a country where only one single mine of copper is wrought.

We travelled five leagues to the village of Maria Magdalena, and two leagues more to the Villa de Cura.

It was Sunday, and at the village of Maria Magdalena the inhabitants were assembled before the church.

They wanted to force our muleteers to stop and hear mass.

We resolved to remain; but, after a long altercation, the muleteers pursued their way.

I may observe, that this is the only dispute in which we became engaged from such a cause.

Very erroneous ideas are formed in Europe of the intolerance, and even of the religious fervour of the Spanish colonists.

San Luis de Cura, or, as it is commonly called, the Villa de Cura, lies in a very barren valley, running north-west and south-east, and elevated, according to my barometrical observations, two hundred and sixty-six toises above the level of the ocean.

The country, with the exception of some fruit-trees, is almost destitute of vegetation.

The dryness of the plateau is the greater, because (and this circumstance is rather extraordinary in a country of primitive rocks) several rivers lose themselves in crevices in the ground.

The Rio de Las Minas, north of the Villa de Cura, is lost in a rock, again appears, and then is ingulphed anew without reaching the lake of Valencia, towards which it flows.

Cura resembles a village more than a town.

We lodged with a family who had excited the resentment of government during the revolution at Caracas in 1797. One of the sons, after having languished in a dungeon, had been sent to the Havannah, to be imprisoned in a strong fortress.

With what joy his mother heard that after our return from the Orinoco, we should visit the Havannah!

She entrusted me with five piastres, "the whole fruit of her savings."

I

earnestly wished to return them to her; but I feared to wound her delicacy, and give pain to a mother, who felt a pleasure in the privations she imposed on herself.

All the society of the town was assembled in the evening, to admire in a magic lantern views of the great capitals of Europe.

We were shown the palace of the Tuileries, and the statue of the Elector at Berlin.

An apothecary who had been ruined by an unhappy propensity for working mines, accompanied us in our excursion to the Serro de Chacao, very rich in auriferous pyrites.

We continued to descend the southern declivity of the Cordillera of the coast, in which the plains of Aragua form a longitudinal valley.

We passed a part of the night of the 11th of March at the village of San Juan, remarkable for its thermal waters, and the singular form of two neighbouring mountains, called the Morros of San Juan.

They form slender peaks, which rise from a wall of rocks with a very extensive base.

The wall is perpendicular, and resembles the Devil's Wall, which surrounds a part of the group of mountains in the Hartz.

* (* Die Teufels Mauer near Wernigerode in Germany.

) These peaks, when seen from afar in the Llanos, strike the imagination of the inhabitants of the plain, who are not accustomed to the least unequal ground, and the height of the peaks is singularly exaggerated by them.

They were described to us as being in the middle of the steppes (which they in reality bound on the north) far beyond a range of hills called La Galera.

Judging from angles taken at the distance of two miles, these hills are scarcely more than a hundred and fifty-six toises higher than the village of San Juan, and three hundred and fifty toises above the level of the Llanos.

The thermal waters glide out at the foot of these hills, which are formed of transition-limestone.

The waters are impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen, like those of Mariara, and form a little pool or lagoon, in which the thermometer rose only to 31. 3 degrees.

I

found, on the night of the 9th of March, by very satisfactory observations of the stars, the latitude of Villa de Cura to be 10 degrees 2 minutes 47 seconds.

The Villa de Cura is celebrated in the country for the miracles of an image of the Virgin, known by the name of Nuestra Senora de los Valencianos.

This image was found in a ravine by an Indian, about the middle of the eighteenth century, when it became the object of a contest between the towns of Cura and San Sebastian de los Reyes.

The vicars of the latter town asserting that the Virgin had made her first appearance on the territory of their parish, the Bishop of Caracas, in order to put an end to the scandal of this long dispute, caused the image to be placed in the archives of his bishopric, and kept it thirty years under seal.

It was not restored to the inhabitants of Cura till 1802. After having bathed in the cool and limpid water of the little river of San Juan, the bottom of which is of basaltic grunstein, we continued our journey at two in the morning, by Ortiz and Parapara, to the Mesa de Paja.

The road to the Llanos being at that time infested with robbers, several travellers joined us so as to form a sort of caravan.

We proceeded down hill during six or seven hours; and we skirted the Cerro de Flores, near which the road turns off, leading to the great village of San Jose de Tisnao.

We passed the farms of Luque and Juncalito, to enter the valleys which, on account of the bad road, and the blue colour of the slates, bear the names of Malpaso and Piedras Azules.

This ground is the ancient shore of the great basin of the steppes, and it furnishes an interesting subject of research to the geologist.

We there find trap-formations, probably more recent than the veins of diabasis near the town of Caracas, which seem to belong to the rocks of igneous formation.

They are not long and narrow streams as in Auvergne, but large sheets, streams that appear like real strata.

The lithoid masses here cover, if we may use the expression, the shore of the ancient interior sea; everything subject to destruction, such as the liquid dejections, and the scoriae filled with bubbles, has been carried away.

These phenomena are particularly worthy of attention on account of the close affinities observed between the phonolites and the amygdaloids, which, containing pyroxenes and hornblende-grunsteins, form strata in a transition-slate.

The better to convey an idea of the whole situation and superposition of these rocks, we will name the formations as they occur in a profile drawn from north to south.

We find at first, in the Sierra de Mariara, which belongs to the northern branch of the Cordillera of the coast, a coarse-grained granite; then, in the valleys of Aragua, on the borders of the lake, and in the islands, it contains, as in the southern branch of the chain of the coast, gneiss and mica-slate.

These last-named rocks are auriferous in the Quebrada del Oro, near Guigue; and between Villa de Cura and the Morros de San Juan, in the mountain of Chacao.

The gold is contained in pyrites, which are found sometimes disseminated almost imperceptibly in the whole mass of the gneiss,* and sometimes united in small veins of quartz.

(* The four metals, which are found disseminated in the granite rocks, as if they were of contemporaneous formation, are gold, tin, titanium, and cobalt.

) Most of the torrents that traverse the mountains bear along with them grains of gold.

The poor inhabitants of Villa de Cura and San Juan have sometimes gained thirty piastres a-day by washing the sand; but most commonly, in spite of their industry, they do not in a week find particles of gold of the value of two piastres.

Here, however, as in every place where native gold and auriferous pyrites are disseminated in the rock, or by the destruction of the rocks, are deposited in alluvial lands, the people conceive the most exaggerated ideas of the metallic riches of the soil.

But the success of the workings, which depends less on the abundance of the ore in a vast space of land than on its accumulation in one point, has not justified these favourable prepossessions.

The mountain of Chacao, bordered by the ravine of Tucutunemo, rises seven hundred feet above the village of San Juan.

It is formed of gneiss, which, especially in the superior strata, passes into mica-slate.

We saw the remains of an ancient mine, known by the name of Real de Santa Barbara.

The works were directed to a stratum of cellular quartz,* full of polyhedric cavities, mixed with iron-ore, containing auriferous pyrites and small grains of gold, sometimes, it is said, visible to the naked eye.

(* This stratum of quartz, and the gneiss in which it is contained, lie hor 8 of the Freyberg compass, and dip 70 degrees to the south-west.

At a hundred toises distance from the auriferous quartz, the gneiss resumes its ordinary situation, hor 3 to 4, with 60 degrees dip to the north-west.

A few strata of gneiss abound in silvery mica, and contain, instead of garnets, an immense quantity of small octohedrons of pyrites.

This silvery gneiss resembles that of the famous mine of Himmelsfurst, in Saxony.

) It appears that the gneiss of the Cerro de Chacao also furnishes another metallic deposit, a mixture of copper and silver-ores.

This deposit has been the object of works attempted with great ignorance by some Mexican miners under the superintendance of M. Avalo.

The gallery* directed to the north-east, is only twenty-five toises long.

(* La Cueva de los Mexicanos.

) We there found some fine specimens of blue carbonated copper mingled with sulphate of barytes and quartz; but we could not ourselves judge whether the ore contained any argentiferous fahlerz, and whether it occurred in a stratum, or, as the apothecary who was our guide asserted, in real veins.

This much is certain, that the attempt at working the mine cost more than twelve thousand piastres in two years.

It would no doubt have been more prudent to have resumed the works on the auriferous stratum of the Real de Santa Barbara.

The zone of gneiss just mentioned is, in the coast-chain from the sea to the Villa de Cura, ten leagues broad.

In this great extent of land, gneiss and mica-slate are found exclusively, and they constitute one formation.

* (* This formation, which we shall call gneiss-mica-slate, is peculiar to the chain of the coast of Caracas.

Five formations must be distinguished, as MM.

von Buch and Raumer have so ably demonstrated in their excellent papers on Landeck and the Riesengebirge, namely, granite, granite-gneiss, gneiss, gneiss-mica-slate, and mica-slate.

Geologists whose researches have been confined to a small tract of land, having confounded these formations which nature has separated in several countries in the most distinct manner, have admitted that the gneiss and mica-slate alternate everywhere in superimposed beds, or furnish insensible transitions from one rock to the other.

These transitions and alternating superpositions take place no doubt in formations of granite-gneiss and gneiss-mica-slate; but because these phenomena are observed in one region, it does not follow that in other regions we may not find very distinct circumscribed formations of granite, gneiss, and mica-slate.

The same considerations may be applied to the formations of serpentine, which are sometimes isolated, and sometimes belong to the eurite, mica-slate, and grunstein.

) Beyond the town of Villa de Cura and the Cerro de Chacao the aspect of the country presents greater geognostic variety.

There are still eight leagues of declivity from the table-land of Cura to the entry of the Llanos; and on the southern slope of the mountains of the coast, four different formations of rock cover the gneiss.

We shall first give the description of the different strata, without grouping them systematically.

On the south of the Cerro de Chacao, between the ravine of Tucutunemo and Piedras Negras, the gneiss is concealed beneath a formation of serpentine, of which the composition varies in the different superimposed strata.

Sometimes it is very pure, very homogeneous, of a dusky olive-green, and of a conchoidal fracture: sometimes it is veined, mixed with bluish steatite, of an unequal fracture, and containing spangles of mica.

In both these states I could not discover in it either garnets, hornblende, or diallage.

Advancing farther to the south (and we always passed over this ground in that direction) the green of the serpentine grows deeper, and feldspar and hornblende are recognised in it: it is difficult to determine whether it passes into diabasis or alternates with it.

There is, however, no doubt of its containing veins of copper-ore.

* (* One of these veins, on which two shafts have been sunk, was directed hor.

2. 1, and dipped 80 degrees east.

The strata of the serpentine, where it is stratified with some regularity, run hor.

8, and dip almost perpendicularly.

I

found malachite disseminated in this serpentine, where it passes into grunstein.

) At the foot of this mountain two fine springs gush out from the serpentine.

Near the village of San Juan, the granular diabasis appears alone uncovered, and takes a greenish black hue.

The feldspar intimately mixed with the mass, may be separated into distinct crystals.

The mica is very rare, and there is no quartz.

The mass assumes at the surface a yellowish crust like dolerite and basalt.

In the midst of this tract of trap-formation, the Morros of San Juan rise like two castles in ruins.

They appear linked to the mornes of St. Sebastian, and to La Galera which bounds the Llanos like a rocky wall.

The Morros of San Juan are formed of limestone of a crystalline texture; sometimes very compact, sometimes spongy, of a greenish-grey, shining, composed of small grains, and mixed with scattered spangles of mica.

This limestone yields a strong effervescence with acids.

I

could not find in it any vestige of organized bodies.

It contains in subordinate strata, masses of hardened clay of a blackish blue, and carburetted.

These masses are fissile, very heavy, and loaded with iron; their streak is whitish, and they produce no effervescence with acids.

They assume at their surface, by their decomposition in the air, a yellow colour.

We seem to recognize in these argillaceous strata a tendency either to the transition-slates, or to the kieselschiefer (schistose jasper), which everywhere characterise the black transition-limestones.

When in fragments, they might be taken at first sight for basalt or hornblende.

* (* I had an opportunity of examining again, with the greatest care, the rocks of San Juan, of Chacao, of Parapara, and of Calabozo, during my stay at Mexico, where, conjointly with M. del Rio, one of the most distinguished pupils of the school of Freyberg, I formed a geognostical collection for the Colegio de Mineria of New Spain.

) Another white limestone, compact, and containing some fragments of shells, backs the Morros de San Juan.

I could not see the line of junction of these two limestones, or that of the calcareous formation and the diabasis.

The transverse valley which descends from Piedras Negras and the village of San Juan, towards Parapara and the Llanos, is filled with trap-rocks, displaying close affinity with the formation of green slates, which they cover.

Sometimes we seem to see serpentine, sometimes grunstein, and sometimes dolerite and basalt.

The arrangement of these problematical masses is not less extraordinary.

Between San Juan, Malpaso, and Piedras Azules, they form strata parallel to each other; and dipping regularly northward at an angle of 40 or 50 degrees, they cover even the green slates in concordant stratification.

Lower down, towards Parapara and Ortiz, where the amygdaloids and phonolites are connected with the grunstein, everything assumes a basaltic aspect.

Balls of grunstein heaped one upon another, form those rounded cones, which are found so frequently in the Mittelgebirge in Bohemia, near Bilin, the country of phonolites.

The following is the result of my partial observations.

The grunstein, which at first alternated with strata of serpentine, or was connected with that rock by insensible transitions, is seen alone, sometimes in strata considerably inclined, and sometimes in balls with concentric strata, imbedded in strata of the same substance.

It lies, near Malpaso, on green slates, steatitic, mingled with hornblende, destitute of mica and grains of quartz, dipping, like the grunsteins, 45 degrees toward the north, and directed, like them, 75 degrees north-west.

A great sterility prevails where these green slates predominate, no doubt on account of the magnesia they contain, which (as is proved by the magnesian-limestone of England*) is very hurtful to vegetation.

(* Magnesian limestone is of a straw-yellow colour, and contains madrepores: it lies beneath red marl, or muriatiferous red sandstone.

) The dip of the green slates continues the same; but by degrees the direction of their strata becomes parallel to the general direction of the primitive rocks of the chain of the coast.

At Piedras Azules these slates, mingled with hornblende, cover in concordant stratification a blackish-blue slate, very fissile, and traversed by small veins of quartz.

The green slates include some strata of grunstein, and even contain balls of that substance.

I nowhere saw the green slates alternate with the black slates of the ravine of Piedras Azules: at the line of junction these two slates appear rather to pass one into the other, the green slates becoming of a pearl-grey in proportion as they lose their hornblende.

Farther south, towards Parapara and Ortiz, the slates disappear.

They are concealed under a trap-formation more varied in its aspect.

The soil becomes more fertile; the rocky masses alternate with strata of clay, which appear to be produced by the decomposition of the grunsteins, the amygdaloids, and the phonolites.

The grunstein, which farther north was less granulous, and passed into serpentine, here assumes a very different character.

It contains balls of mandelstein, or amygdaloid, eight or ten inches in diameter.

These balls, sometimes a little flattened, are divided into concentric layers: this is the effect of decomposition.

Their nucleus is almost as hard as basalt, and they are intermingled with little cavities, owing to bubbles of gas, filled with green earth, and crystals of pyroxene and mesotype.

Their basis is greyish blue, rather soft, and showing small white spots which, by the regular form they present, I should conceive to be decomposed feldspar.

M.

von Buch examined with a powerful lens the species we brought.

He discovered that each crystal of pyroxene, enveloped in the earthy mass, is separated from it by fissures parallel to the sides of the crystal.

These fissures seem to be the effect of a contraction which the mass or basis of the mandelstein has undergone.

I sometimes saw these balls of mandelstein arranged in strata, and separated from each other by beds of grunstein of ten or fourteen inches thick; sometimes (and this situation is most common) the balls of mandelstein, two or three feet in diameter, are found in heaps, and form little mounts with rounded summits, like spheroidal basalt.

The clay which separates these amygdaloid concretions arises from the decomposition of their crust.

They acquire by the contact of the air a very thin coating of yellow ochre.

South-west of the village of Parapara rises the little Cerro de Flores, which is discerned from afar in the steppes.

Almost at its foot, and in the midst of the mandelstein tract we have just been describing, a porphyritic phonolite, a mass of compact feldspar of a greenish grey, or mountain-green, containing long crystals of vitreous feldspar, appears exposed.

It is the real porphyrschiefer of Werner;

and it would be difficult to distinguish, in a collection of stones, the phonolite of Parapara from that of Bilin, in Bohemia.

It does not, however, here form rocks in grotesque shapes, but little hills covered with tabular blocks, large plates extremely sonorous, translucid on the edges, and wounding the hands when broken.