CATARACTS OF THE ORINOCO. 221 



even the rude natives of Guiana. The Indians everywhere 

 called our attention to the traces of the former height/of the 

 waters. There is in a grassy plain near Uruana an isolated 

 granite rock, on which, according' to the report of trust- 

 worthy witnesses, there are at a height of 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 de- 

 serves 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 excited by what are called the natural drawings or pictures 

 of the Sun and Moon. The rock Keri, to which I have 



