But It Is Different In The Missions Of Spanish Guiana, Where Nations Of Various Races Are Mingled In The Village.

It is not even sufficient to have learned the Caribee or Carina, the Guamo, the Guahive, the Jaruro, the

Ottomac, the Maypure, the Salive, the Marivitan, the Maquiritare, and the Guaica, ten dialects, of which there exist only imperfect grammars, and which have less affinity with each other than the Greek, German, and Persian languages.

The environs of the Mission of Carichana appeared to us to be delightful. The little village is situated in one of those plains covered with grass that separate all the links of the granitic mountains, from Encaramada to beyond the Cataracts of Maypures. The line of the forests is seen only in the distance. The horizon is everywhere bounded by mountains, partly wooded and of a dark tint, partly bare, with rocky summits gilded by the beams of the setting sun. What gives a peculiar character to the scenery of this country are banks of rock (laxas) nearly destitute of vegetation, and often more than eight hundred feet in circumference, yet scarcely rising a few inches above the surrounding savannahs. They now make a part of the plain. We ask ourselves with surprise, whether some extraordinary revolutions may have carried away the earth and plants; or whether the granite nucleus of our planet shows itself bare, because the germs of life are not yet developed on all its points. The same phenomenon seems to be found also in the desert of Shamo, which separates Mongolia from China. Those banks of solitary rock in the desert are called tsy. I think they would be real table-lands, if the surrounding plains were stripped of the sand and mould that cover them, and which the waters have accumulated in the lowest places. On these stony flats of Carichana we observed with interest the rising vegetation in the different degrees of its development. We there found lichens cleaving the rock, and collected in crusts more or less thick; little portions of sand nourishing succulent plants; and lastly layers of black mould deposited in the hollows, formed from the decay of roots and leaves, and shaded by tufts of evergreen shrubs.

At the distance of two or three leagues from the Mission, we find, in these plains intersected by granitic hills, a vegetation no less rich than varied. On comparing the site of Carichana with that of all the villages above the Great Cataracts, we are surprised at the facility with which we traverse the country, without following the banks of the rivers, or being stopped by the thickness of the forests. M. Bonpland made several excursions on horseback, which furnished him with a rich harvest of plants. I shall mention only the paraguatan, a magnificent species of the macrocnemum, the bark of which yields a red dye;* (* Macrocnemum tinctorium.) the guaricamo, with a poisonous root;* (* Ityania coccidea.) the Jacaranda obtusifolia; and the serrape, or jape* (* Dipterix odorata, Willd. or Baryosma tongo of Gaertner. The jape furnishes Carichana with excellent timber.) of the Salive Indians, which is the Coumarouna of Aublet, so celebrated throughout Terra Firma for its aromatic fruit. This fruit, which at Caracas is placed among linen, as in Europe it is in snuff, under the name of tonca, or Tonquin bean, is regarded as poisonous. It is a false notion, very general in the province of Cumana, that the excellent liqueur fabricated at Martinique owes its peculiar flavour to the jape. In the Missions it is called simaruba; a name that may occasion serious mistakes, the true simaruba being a febrifuge species of the Quassia genus, found in Spanish Guiana only in the valley of Rio Caura, where the Paudacot Indians give it the name of achecchari.

I found the dip of the magnetic needle, in the great square at Carichana, 33.7 degrees (new division). The intensity of the magnetic action was expressed by two hundred and twenty-seven oscillations in ten minutes of time; an increase of force that would seem to indicate some local attraction. Yet the blocks of the granite, blackened by the waters of the Orinoco, have no perceptible action upon the needle.

The river had risen several inches during the day on the 10th of April; this phenomenon surprised the natives so much the more, as the first swellings are almost imperceptible, and are usually followed in the month of April by a fall for some days. The Orinoco was already three feet higher than the level of the lowest waters. The natives showed us on a granite wall the traces of the great rise of the waters of late years. We found them to be forty-two feet high, which is double the mean rise of the Nile. But this measure was taken in a place where the bed of the Orinoco is singularly hemmed in by rocks, and I could only notice the marks shown me by the natives. It may easily be conceived that the effect and the height of the increase differs according to the profile of the river, the nature of the banks more or less elevated, the number of rivers flowing in that collect the pluvial waters, and the length of ground passed over. It is an unquestionable fact that at Carichana, at San Borja, at Atures, and at Maypures, wherever the river has forced its way through the mountains, you see at a hundred, sometimes at a hundred and thirty feet, above the highest present swell of the river, black bands and erosions, that indicate the ancient levels of the waters. Is then this river, which appears to us so grand and so majestic, only the feeble remains of those immense currents of fresh water which heretofore traversed the country at the east of the Andes, like arms of inland seas? What must have been the state of those low countries of Guiana that now undergo the effects of annual inundations? What immense numbers of crocodiles, manatees, and boas must have inhabited these vast spaces of land, converted alternately into marshes of stagnant water, and into barren and fissured plains!

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