Across Nicaragua with Transit and Machete. 333 



several miles from the San Juan it is a sluggish, muddy stream 

 between steep slippery banks ; higher up, flowing over a gravelly 

 and then a rocky bed, it finally disappears in steep ravines 

 filled with huge bowlders. The main San Francisco comes 

 from the northwest, but a large tributary has its source to the 

 eastward in a range of hills which separates the San Francisco 

 basin from the immediate Caribbean water-shed. This range, 

 unlike the ones already noted, is at heart an uninterrupted mass 

 of homogeneous hypersthene andesite, and with one exception 

 nothing but fragments of trap or trap in situ, is to be found in 

 any of the streams descending from either its western or eastern 

 slopes. The one exception is the Canito Maria, a tributary of 

 the San Francisco, entering it but little more than a mile from the 

 San Juan. In the bed of this stream were abundant sj)ecimens of 

 agates, jasper, and petrified woods of several varieties in a 

 wonderfully good state of preservation. 



This range of hills ends at the Tamborcito bend of the San 

 Juan, four miles below the mouth of the San Francisco, and is the 

 last easterlj^ projecting spur from the mountain backbone of the 

 interior. Between it and the coast there are, however, mountain 

 masses of equal or greater elevation, notably " El Gigante " and 

 the Silico hills, the former some fifteen hundred feet high, but 

 these are simply isolated mountain ganglia, their innumerable 

 radiating spurs speedily giving way to swamps or river valleys. 



The streams that flow down the eastern slope of the Silico hills 

 are, from their sources to the lowlands, of almost idyllic beauty. 

 Beginning as noisy little brooks tumbling over black rocks in a 

 V-shaped ravine near the summit of the hills, they rapidly gather 

 volume and slide along in a polished channel of trap, tumbling 

 every now and then as sheets of white spray over vertical ledges 

 forming here and there deep green pools, and then after they 

 have passed down among the foot-hills, rippling in broad shallow 

 reaches over sunlit beds of bright yellow gravel. The water of 

 these streams is clear and sparkling as that of an Alpine stream 

 and apparently almost as cool. The insect pests of the tropics 

 are unknown in the elevated portions of their valleys, and I have 

 slept more than once beside one of these streams, several hundred 

 feet above sea level, without a mosquito bar, while the delightful 

 " trades," rustling through the trees above me, brought the mur- 

 mur of the Caribbean surf miles away, to mingle with that of the 

 stream. 



VOL. I. 35 



