SECONDARY BOCKS. 



strikes against the face of the traveller, as it does against the 

 ball of the thermometer. 1 never observed the mercury rise 

 in America, amid a wind of sand, above 45'8 cent. Captain 

 Lyon, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing on his 

 return from Mourzouk, appeared to me also inclined to think, 

 that the temperature of fifty-two degrees, so often felt in 

 Fezzan, is produced in great part by the grains of quartz 

 suspended in the atmosphere. Between Pao and the village 

 ot Santa Cruz de Cachipo, founded in 1749, and inhabited 

 by five hundred Caribs, we passed the western elongation of 

 the little table-land, known by the name of Mesa de Amana. 

 This table-land forms a point of partition between the Ori- 

 noco, the Gruarapiche, and the coast of New Andalusia. 

 Its height is so inconsiderable, that it would scarcely be an 

 obstacle to the establishment of inland navigation in this 

 part of the Llanos. The Rio Mano however, which flows 

 into the Orinoco above the confluence of the Carony, and 

 which D' Anville (I know not on what authority) has marked 

 in the first edition of his great map as issuing from the lake 

 ot Valencia, and receiving the waters of the Guayra, could 

 never have served as a natural canal between two basins of 

 rivers. No bifurcation of this kind exists in the Llano. 

 A great number of Carib Indians, who now inhabit the 

 missions of Piritu, were formerly on the north and east of 

 the table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of 

 the Rio Arco, and the Gruarapiche. The incursions of Don 

 Joseph Careno, one of the most enterprising governors of 

 the province of Cumana, occasioned a general migration of 

 independent Caribs toward the banks of the Lower Ori- 

 noco in 1720. 



The whole of this vast plain consists of secondary forma- 

 tions, which to the southward rest immediately on the gra- 

 nitic mountains of the Orinoco. On the north-west they 

 are separated by a narrow band of transition-rocks from the 

 primitive mountains of the shore of Caracas. This abun- 

 dance of secondary rocks, covering without interruption 

 a space of more than seven thousand square leagues,* is a 

 phenomenon the more remarkable in that region of the 



* Reckoning only that part of the Llanos which is bounded by the Rio 

 Apure on the south, and by the Sierra Nevada de Merida and the Parima 

 de las Rosas on the west. 



