256 
INTERIOR OF THE CAVERN. 
shining leaves, raise their branches vertically towards the 
sky ; whilst those of the courbaril and the erythrina form, 
as "they extend, a thick canopy of verdure. Plants of the 
family of pothos, with succulent stems, oxalises, and orchide® 
of a singular structure,* rise in the driest clefts of the rocks; 
while creeping plants waving in the winds are interwoven 
in festoons before the opening of the cavern. Wc distin- 
guished in these festoons a bignonia of a violet blue, the 
purple doliehos, and for the first time, that magnificent 
solandra,t which has an orange-coloured flower and a fleshy 
tube rm^'e than four inches long. 
But this luxury of vegetation embellishes not only the 
external arch, it appears even in the vestibule of the 
grotto. We saw with astonishment plantain-leaved heli- 
conias eighteen feet high, the praga palm-tree, and arbor- 
escent arums, following the course of the river, even to 
those subterranean places. The vegetation continues in 
the cave of Caripe as in those deep crevices of the Andes, 
half-excluded from the light of day, and does not disappear 
till, nenetrating into the interior, we advance thirty or forty 
paces from the entrance. We measured the way by means 
of a cord ; and we went on about four hunched’ and thirty 
feet without being obliged to light our torches. Daylight 
penetrates far into thus region, because the grotto forms 
but one single channel, keeping the same direction, from 
south-east to north-west. Where the light began to fail, 
we heard from afar the hoarse sounds of the nocturnal birds; 
sounds which the natives think belong exclusively to those 
subterraneous places. 
The guacharo is of the size of our fowls. It has the 
mouth of the goat-suckers and procnias, and the port of 
those vultures whose crooked beaks are surrounded with 
stiff silky hairs. Suppressing, with M. Cuvier, the order 
of picae, we must refer this extraordinary bird to the pas- 
seres, the genera of which are connected with each other 
by almost imperceptible transitions. It forms a new genus, 
very different from the goatsucker, in the loudness of its 
voice, in the vast strength of its beak (containing a double 
* A dendrobiuro, with a gold-coloured flower, spotted with black, three 
inches long. 
t Solandra scandens. It is the gousancha of tho Cbayraa Indisns. 
