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From the extensive table-land of the Villa de Cura we descended towards the banks of the Rio Tucutunemo, which has hollowed for itself, in a serpentine rock, a longitudinal valley running from east to west, at nearly the same level as La Victoria. A transverse valley, lying generally north and south, led us into the Llanos, by the villages of Parapara and Ortiz.
It is probable, that the irruption of the waters towards the Llanos have given, by extraordinary rents, the form of ruins to the Morros of San Juan and of San Sebastian. The volcanic tract of Parapara and Ortis is now only 30 or 40 toises above the Llanos. The eruptions consequently took place at the lowest point of the granitic chain.
But Don Pablo was too good a botanist not to know the nature of the trees that grew around, and the uses to which they could be applied. Near by grew a curious tree, which is known among the Indians as the parapara. It was the soap-berry of botanists and Don Pablo knew that the bark of the berries, when rubbed, produces a lather that will wash linen equal to the best "Castile."
Having now accomplished this task, I shall trace the route by which we proceeded from the volcanic mountains of Parapara and the northern side of the Llanos, to the banks of the Apure, in the province of Varinas. It was a solitary house in the steppes, surrounded by a few small huts, covered with reeds and skins.
Here the difficulty seems to arise from the too intimate and too numerous relations observed in rocks that are thought not to belong to the same family. I found no real basalt or dolerite; but the presence of pyroxene in the amygdaloid of Parapara leaves little doubt of the igneous origin of those spheroidal masses, fissured, and full of cavities.
This conclusion is not deduced from the observations I made at the southern declivity of the littoral Cordillera, between the Morros of San Juan, Parapara and the Llanos of Calabozo. The greyish blue amygdaloid contains fendilated crystals of pyroxene and mesotype. It forms balls with concentric layers of which the flattened centre is nearly as hard as basalt.
After having bathed in the cool and limpid water of the little river of San Juan, the bottom of which is of basaltic grunstein, we continued our journey at two in the morning, by Ortiz and Parapara, to the Mesa de Paja. The road to the Llanos being at that time infested with robbers, several travellers joined us so as to form a sort of caravan.
Northward the granitic chain of the Silla de Caracas and Porto Cabello are separated from the Llanos by a screen of mountains that are schistose between Villa de Cura and Parapara, and calcareous between the Bergantin and Caripe. I was no less struck by this absence of blocks on the banks of the Amazon.
The ancient pyrogenic rocks which I found near Parapara where they rise in mounds with rounded summits, are the more remarkable as no others have hitherto been discovered in the whole eastern part of South America.
Thus I observed them on a length of more than a hundred leagues, in the littoral chain of Venezuela; in the stratified granite of Las Trincheras at Porto Cabello; in the gneiss of the islands of the lake of Valencia, and in the vicinity of the Villa de Cura; in the transition-slate and greenstone on the north of Parapara; in the road from La Guayra to the town of Caracas, and through all the Sierra de Avila in Cape Codera; and in the mica-slate and clay-slate of the peninsula of Araya.
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