On Entering Their Defiles,
Therefore, They Often Hang Offerings On The Trees, Or Place Them
On The Rocks, To Propitiate The Invisible "Lords Of The
Mountains," And Procure Good Weather And Successful Hunting; And
They Attach Unusual Significance To The Echoes Which Haunt The
Precipices.
This superstition may also have arisen, in part, from
a natural phenomenon of a singular nature.
In the most calm and
serene weather, and at all times of the day or night, successive
reports are now and then heard among these mountains, resembling
the discharge of several pieces of artillery. Similar reports
were heard by Messrs. Lewis and Clarke in the Rocky Mountains,
which they say were attributed by the Indians to the bursting of
the rich mines of silver contained in the bosom of the mountains.
In fact, these singular explosions have received fanciful
explanations from learned men, and have not been satisfactorily
accounted for even by philosophers. They are said to occur
frequently in Brazil. Vasconcelles, Jesuit father, describes one
which he heard in the Sierra, or mountain region of Piratininga,
and which he compares to the discharges of a park of artillery.
The Indians told him that it was an explosion of stones. The
worthy father had soon a satisfactory proof of the truth of their
information, for the very place was found where a rock had burst
and exploded from its entrails a stony mass, like a bomb-shell,
and of the size of a bull's heart. This mass was broken either in
its ejection or its fall, and wonderful was the internal
organization revealed. It had a shell harder even than iron;
within which were arranged, like the seeds of a pomegranate,
jewels of various colors; some transparent as crystals; others of
a fine red, and others of mixed hues. The same phenomenon is said
to occur occasionally in the adjacent province of Guayra, where
stones of the bigness of a man's hand are exploded, with a loud
noise, from the bosom of the earth, and scatter about glittering
and beautiful fragments that look like precious gems, but are of
no value.
The Indians of the Orellanna, also, tell of horrible noises heard
occasionally in the Paraguaxo, which they consider the throes and
groans of the mountains, endeavoring to cast forth the precious
stones hidden within its entrails. Others have endeavored to
account for these discharges of "mountain artillery" on humbler
principles; attributing them to the loud reports made by the
disruption and fall of great masses of rock, reverberated and
prolonged by the echoes; others, to the disengagement of
hydrogen, produced by subterraneous beds of coal in a state of
ignition. In whatever way this singular phenomenon may be
accounted for, the existence of it appears to be well
established. It remains one of the lingering mysteries of nature
which throw something of a supernatural charm over her wild
mountain solitudes; and we doubt whether the imaginative reader
will not rather join with the poor Indian in attributing it to
the thunderspirits, or the guardian genii of unseen treasures,
than to any commonplace physical cause.
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