Notes oil Jungle and Other Wild Life. 195 



breasted— throat and breast of a deep purple, wings and tail 

 black, and the remainder of his body a beautiful shining blue! 

 Finally, the Pompadour Cotinga (Xipholcna punicea) is entirely 

 purple except that his wings are white edged with brown. 



Visualize, also, the toucans and the toucanets. One 

 thinks chiefly of their enormous bills, but even these are 

 gorgeously painted in tints that are repeated in their still more 

 brilliant plumage. Then the iridescent macaws (those studies 

 in splendid pigmentation) as well as the other highly tinted 

 parrots and parrakeets; likewise the lovely trogons and 

 jacamars, in addition to flocks of snowwhite egrets, scarlet 

 ibises, eagles, hawks and water birds — all these form but a 

 small fraction of the colonial avifauna. 



Kaietour (Patamona word meaning Old Man's Fall) is 

 really pronounced Ky-too-eh, but as the last syllable is accom- 

 panied by a sort of subdued click, which none but an Indian can 

 indicate, the generally received spelling is about as nearly 

 correct as we are likely to get it. 



The fall was discovered in 1870 by Barrington Brown, 

 Government Surveyor. Sir Everard im Thurn {Amongst the 

 Indians of Guiana) visited it during the dry season of 1878. He 

 then remarked that in his opinion the entrance to the Kaietour 

 gorge — at Amatuk — furnishes the most beautiful scenery of this 

 lovely tropical river ; and all our party agreed with him. " If," 

 says he, '" the whole valley of the Potaro is fairyland, then the 

 Kaietour Ravine is the penetralia of fairyland." Of the fall 

 itself, seen close at hand and from above, he exclaims " Then, 

 and only then, the splendid, and in the most solemn sense of the 

 word, awful beauty of the Kaietour burst upon me. Seven 

 hundred and fifty feet below, encircled by black boulders, lay a 

 great pool, into which the column of white water, graceful as a 

 ceaseless flight of innumerable rockets, thundered from my 

 side. Behind the fall, through the thinnest parts of the veil 

 of foam and mist, the great black cavern made the white of the 

 v.ater look yet more white." 



This was during the dry season, when comparatively 

 little water rolled into the deep gorge. However, a second 

 visit was made when the Potaro was in flood, at the end of a 

 rainy season, with an entirely different picture: — 



