BITE OF CUMA2TA. 
151 
effects of the heat of the tropics. The negro was a young 
man, eighteen years of age, very robust, and born on the 
coast of Guinea ; an abode of some years on the high plain 
of Castile, had imparted to his organization that kind of 
irritability which renders the miasma of the torrid zone so 
dangerous to the inhabitants of the countries of the north. 
The site on which Cumana is built is part of a tract of 
ground, very remarkable in a geological point of view. The 
chain of the calcareous Alps of the Brigantine and the Tata- 
raqual stretches east and west from the summit of the Im- 
possible to the port of Mochima and to Campanario. The 
sea, in times far remote, appears to have divided this chain 
from the rocky coasts of Araya and Maniquarez. The vast 
gulf of Cariaco has been caused by an irruption of the sea • 
and no doubt can he entertained but that the waters once 
covered, on the southern bank, the whole tract of land 
impregnated with muriate of soda, through which flows tho 
Manzanares. The_ slow retreat of the waters has turned 
into dry ground this extensive plain, in which rises a group 
of small hills, composed of gypsum aud calcareous breccias 
of very recent formation. The city of Cumana is backed by 
this, group, which was formerly an island of the gulf of 
Cariaco. That part of the plain which is north of the city 
is called Plaga Chiea, or the Little Plain, and extends east- 
wards as far as Punta Eelgada, where a narrow valley, 
covered with yellow gomphrena, still marks the point of the 
ancient outlet of the waters. 
The hill of calcareous breccias, which we have just men- 
tioned as having once been an island in the ancient gulf, is 
covered with a thick forest of cylindric cactus and opuntia. 
Some ol these trees, thirty or forty feet high, are covered 
with lichens, and are divided into several branches in the 
form of candelabra. Near Maniquarez, at Punta Araya, we 
measured a cactus,*' the trunk of w hich was four feet nine 
inches in circumference. A European acquainted only with 
the opuntia in our hot-houses is surprised to see the wood of 
this plant become so hard from age, that it resists for cen- 
turies both air and moisture: the Indians of Cumana therefore 
employ it in preference to any other for oars and door-posts. 
1 una macho. We distinguish in tne wood of the cactus the medul* 
lary prolongations, as M. Desiontaines has already observed. 
