CATARACTS OF THE ORINOCO. 179 



more than eighty feet drawings of the sun and moon, and of many 

 animals, particularly crocodiles and boas, engraven or arranged 

 almost in rows or- lines. Without artificial aid, it would now be 

 impossible to ascend this perpendicular precipice, which deserves to 

 be carefully examined by future travellers. The hieroglyphical 

 rock engravings on the mountains of Uruana and Encaramada are 

 equally remarkable in respect to situation. 



If one asks the natives how these figures can have been cut in 

 the rocks, they answer that it was done when the waters were so 

 high that their fathers' boats were only a little lower than the 

 drawings. Those rude memorials of human art would in such case 

 have belonged to the same age as a state of the waters implying a 

 distribution of land and water very different from that which now 

 prevails, and belonging to an earlier condition of the earth's surface; 

 which .must not, however, be- confounded with that in which the 

 earlier vegetation which adorned our planet, the gigantic bodies of 

 extinct land animals, and the oceanic creatures of a more chaotic 

 state, became entombed in the indurating crust of globe. 



At the northernmost extremity of the Cataracts, attention is ex- 

 cited by what are called the natural drawings or pictures of the sun 

 and moon. The rock Keri, to which I have several times referred, 

 has received its name from a white spot which is conspicuous from 

 a great distance, and in which the Indians have thought they recog- 

 nized a remarkable similarity to the disk of the full moon. I was not 

 myself able to climb the steep precipice,- but , the white mark in 

 question is probably a large knot of quartz formed by a cluster of 

 veins in the grayish-black granite. 



Opposite to the Keri rock, on the twin mountain of the Island of 

 Uivitari, which has a basaltic appearance, the Indians show with 

 mysterious admiration a similar disk, which they venerate as the 

 image of the sun, Camosi. Perhaps the geographical position of 

 the two rocks may have contributed to these denominations, as the 

 Keri (or Moon Rock) is turned to the west, and the Camosi to the 

 east. Some etymologists have thought they recognized in the 

 American word Camosi a similarity to Camosh, the name of the 

 sun in one of the Phoenician dialects, and to Apollo Chomeus, or 

 Beelphegor and Aminon, 



