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The cayman plunged sullenly into the sedgy water; and the "Sajou" monkey, suspended by his prehensile tail from some overhanging bough, oscillated to and fro, and filled the air with his hideous, half-human cries. Halting for a moment to refill the canteens, we crossed over and ascended the opposite bank.
The water bubbled cheerfully in the hot dishes as though uttering sounds of consolation, or perchance of sarcasm and irony, to the dead fishes. The body of the cayman writhed about, sometimes showing its torn white belly and again its speckled greenish back, while man, Nature's favorite, went on his way undisturbed by what the Brahmins and vegetarians would call so many cases of fratricide.
This order, worthy of another age, was executed by Don Antonio de Arebalo: he experienced little resistance and formed, in 1785, the four settlements and forts of Cayman on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Urabia, Concepcion, Carolina and Mandinga.
The amphibious are the beaver, the fresh-water and sea-otter, the musk-rat, and a species of long lizard, with sharp teeth, very like the cayman as regards the head and tail, but with a very short body.
It is somewhat analogous to Jura limestone; and, judging from their external aspect, the Cayman Islands are composed of the same rock. Sometimes the fragments form a mass of from one to two cubic feet and the grains of quartz so disappear that in several layers one might imagine that the polypi have remained on the spot.
The Cayman Islands, in that neighborhood, are the summits of mountains bordering this deep valley at the bottom of the sea, which has been found, by a series of soundings, to extend over seven hundred miles from between Cuba and Jamaica nearly to the Bay of Honduras, with an average breadth of eighty miles.
Some of the company sat on the ground or reclined in hammocks swung from the branches of the trees, while others amused themselves around a wide flat rock on which were to be seen playing-cards, a chess-board, booklets, cowry shells, and pebbles. They showed the cayman to the curate, but he seemed inattentive until they told him that the gaping wound had been inflicted by Ibarra.
The tale was told him by the governor of that place. "One fine evening, as the people of the city were sauntering up and down the alamada by the banks of the river, a large cayman rushed out of the water, seized a man, and carried him down, before any person had it in his power to assist him. The screams of the poor fellow were terrible as the cayman was running off with him.
The people pulled the cayman to the surface; he plunged furiously as soon as he arrived in these upper regions, and immediately went below again on their slackening the rope. I saw enough not to fall in love at first sight. I now told them we would run all risks, and have him on land immediately. They pulled again, and out he came—‘monstrum horrendum, informe.’ This was an interesting moment.
It seems almost incredible that a man could overtake and master the large cayman in his own element; but such was the case in this instance, for the animal was reached and forced to release his booty by the man's thrusting his thumb into his eye. The lad showed us the marks of the alligator's teeth on his thigh.
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