47G 
COKITGUBATIOX 01’ THE TALI .IT. 
and other European fruits for the market of Caracas. 
Between Antimano and Ajuntas we crossed the Eio Guayra 
seventeen times. The road is very fatiguing ; yet, instead 
of making a new one, it would perhaps be better to 
change the bed of the river, which loses a great quantity of 
water by the combined effects of filtration and evaporation. 
Each sinuosity forms a marsh more or less extensive. This 
loss of water is to be regretted in a province, nearly all the 
cultivated portions of which are extremely dry. The rains 
are much less frequent and less violent in this place than m 
the interior of New Andalusia, at Cumanacoa, and on the 
banks of the Guarapiche. Many of the mountains of 
Caracas enter the region of the clouds ; but the strata ot 
primitive rocks dip at an angle of 70° or 80°, and generally 
to northwest, so that the waters are either lost in the 
interior of the earth, or gush out in copious springs not 
southward but northward of the mountains of the coast of 
Niguatar, A vila, and Mariara. The rising of the gneiss and 
mica-slate strata to the south appears to me to explain in a 
considerable degree the extreme humidity of the coast. In 
the interior of the province we meet with portions of land, 
two or three leagues square, iu which there are no springs ; 
consequently sugar-cane, indigo, and coffee, grow only in 
places where running waters can be made to supply artificial 
irrigation during very dry weather. The early colonists im- 
prudently destroyed "the forests. Evaporation is enormous 
on a stony soil surrounded with rocks, which radiate heat 
on every side. The mountains of the coast, like a wall, 
extending east and west from Cape Codera toward Point 
Tucacas, prevent the humid air of the shore (that is to say, 
those inferior strata of the atmosphere resting immediately 
on the sea, and dissolving the largest proportion of water) 
from penetrating to the islands. There are few openings, 
few ravines, which, like those of Catia or of Tipe, lead from 
the coast to the high longitudinal valleys, and. there is no 
bed of a great river, no gulf allowing the sea to flow inland, 
spreading moisture by abundant evaporation. In the eighth 
and tenth degrees of latitude, in regions where the clouds 
do not, as it were, skim the surface of the soil, many trees 
are stripped of their leaves in the months of January and 
February ; not by the sinking of the temperature as in 
