GEOLOGICAL PHENOMENA. 83 
ducted the travellers over Barigon and Caney, to 
the village of Maniquarez. The thermometer kept 
as high as 78°5°, and before their guide had travel- 
led a league, he frequently sat down to rest himself, 
and expressed a desire to repose under the shade of a 
tamarind-tree until night should approach. Hum- 
boldt explains the circumstance, that the natives 
complain more of lassitude under an intense heat 
than Europeans not inured to it, by a reference to 
their listless disposition, and their not being excited 
by the same stimulus. 
In crossing the arid hills of Cape Cirial, they per- 
ceived a strong smell of petroleum, the wind blow- 
ing from the side where the springs of that sub- 
stance occur. Near the village of Maniquarez, they 
found the mica-slate cropping out from below the 
secondary rocks. It was of a silvery white, con- 
tained garnets, and was traversed by small layers 
of quartz. From a detached block of this last, found 
on the shore, they separated a fragment of cyanite, 
the only specimen of that mineral seen by them in 
South America. 
A rude manufacture of pottery is carried on at 
that hamlet by the Indian women. The clay is 
produced by the decomposition of mica-slate, and is 
of areddish colour. The natives, being unacquaint- 
ed with the use of ovens, place twigs around the 
vessels, and bake them in the open air. 
At the same place they met with some Creoles who 
had been hunting small deer in the uninhabited islet 
of Cubagua, where they are very abundant. These 
creatures are of a brownish-red hue, spotted with 
white, and of the latter colour beneath. They belong 
to thespecies named by naturalists Cervus Mexicanus. 
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