Near San Pedro, The Talcose Gneiss Of Buenavista Passes Into A Mica-Slate Filled With Garnets, And Containing Subordinate Beds Of Serpentine.

Something analogous to this is met with at Zoblitz in Saxony.

The serpentine, which is very pure and of a fine green, varied with spots of a lighter tint, often appears only superimposed on the mica-slate. I found in it a few garnets, but no metaloid diallage.

The valley of San Pedro, through which flows the river of the same name, separates two great masses of mountains, the Higuerote and Las Cocuyzas. We ascended westward in the direction of the small farms of Las Lagunetos and Garavatos. These are solitary houses, which serve as inns, and where the mule-drivers obtain their favourite beverage, the guarapo, or fermented juice of the sugar-cane: intoxication is very common among the Indians who frequent this road. Near Garavatos there is a mica-slate rock of singular form; it is a ridge, or steep wall, crowned by a tower. We opened the barometer at the highest point of the mountain Las Cocuyzas,* (* Absolute height 845 toises.) and found ourselves almost at the same elevation as on the table-land of Buenavista, which is scarcely ten toises higher.

The prospect at Las Lagunetas is extensive, but rather uniform. This mountainous and uncultivated tract of ground between the sources of the Guayra and the Tuy is more than twenty-five square leagues in extent. We there found only one miserable village, that of Los Teques, south-east of San Pedro. The soil is as it were furrowed by a multitude of valleys, the smallest of which, parallel with each other, terminate at right angles in the largest valleys. The back of the mountains presents an aspect as monotonous as the ravines; it has no pyramidal forms, no ridges, no steep declivities. I am inclined to think that the undulation of this ground, which is for the most part very gentle, is less owing to the nature of the rocks, (to the decomposition of the gneiss for instance), than to the long presence of the water and the action of currents. The limestone mountains of Cumana present the same phenomenon north of Tumiriquiri.

From Las Lagunetas we descended into the valley of the Rio Tuy. This western slope of the mountains of Los Teques bears the name of Las Cocuyzas, and it is covered with two plants with agave leaves; the maguey of Cocuyza, and the maquey of Cocuy. The latter belongs to the genus Yucca.* (* Yucca acaulis, Humb.) Its sweet and fermented juice yields a spirit by distillation; and I have seen the young leaves of this plant eaten. The fibres of the full-grown leaves furnish cords of extraordinary strength.* (* At the clock of the cathedral of Caracas, a cord of maguey, half an inch in diameter, sustained for fifteen years a weight of 350 pounds.) Leaving the mountains of the Higuerote and Los Teques, we entered a highly cultivated country, covered with hamlets and villages; several of which would in Europe be called towns.

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