92 
SECOXDART ROCKS. 
strikes against tlie face oJ the traveller, as it does against the 
ball of the thermometer. I never observed the mercury rise 
in America, amid a wind of sand, above 45‘8° cent. Captai n 
Lyon, with whom I had the pleasure of conversing on h is 
return from Mourzouk, appeared to me also inclined to think, 
that the temperature ot fifty-two degrees, so often felt in 
h'ezzan, is produced in great part by the grains of quartz 
suspended in the atmosphere. Between Pao and the village 
of Santa Cruz de Caehipo, founded in 1740, 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 Ibrms a point of partition between the Ori- 
uoi:o, the Guarapiche, 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 Eio 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 ot 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 ol' 
the table-land of Amana, between Maturin, the mouth of 
the Rio Arco, and the Guarapiche. The incursions of Don 
Joseph Careno, one of the most enterprising governors of 
the province of Cuinana, occasioned a generd migration ol 
independent Caribs toward the banks of the Lower Ori- 
noco in 1720. 
The whole of this vast plain consists of secondary forma- 
tions, w'hich 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 tlie Rio 
Apurc on tlie south, and by the Sierra Nevada de Merida and the Parimil 
de las Rosas on the we.et. 
