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From this point we perceived towards the left the great pyramid of Guacharo. The appearance of this calcareous peak is very picturesque, but we soon lost sight of it, on entering the thick forest, known by the name of the Montana de Santa Maria. We descended without intermission for seven hours.
The road led us along a continual ascent through a vast savannah, as far as the table-land of Guardia de San Augustin. We there halted to wait for the Indian who carried the barometer. We found ourselves to be at 533 toises of absolute elevation, or a little higher than the bottom of the cavern of Guacharo.
Though we made many enquiries among the inhabitants of Caripe, Cumanacoa, and Cariaco, we did not learn that they had ever discovered in the cavern of Guacharo either the remains of carnivorous animals, or those bony breccias of herbivorous animals, which are found in the caverns of Germany and Hungary, and in the clefts of the calcareous rocks of Gibraltar.
We were assured that they are inhabited by nocturnal birds, the same as those we were soon to become acquainted with in the Cueva del Guacharo of Caripe. Near these caverns we saw strata of schistose marl, and found, with great astonishment, rock-crystals encased in beds of alpine limestone. They were hexahedral prisms, terminated with pyramids, fourteen lines long and eight thick.
He had brought home also several Guacharos from the Trinidad caves, all of which died on the passage, for want, seemingly, of the oily nuts on which they feed. A live Guacharo has, as yet, never been seen in Europe; and to get one safe to the Zoological Gardens, as well as to get one or two corpses for the Cambridge Museum, was our hope a hope still, alas! unfulfilled.
Now, it is these very Guacharo birds which are to me the most wonderful part of the story. The Indians kill and eat them for their fat, although they believe they have to do with evil spirits. But scientific men who have studied these birds will tell you that they are more wonderful than if all the Indians' fancies about them were true.
The summit of the Sierra is flat, and it is only at its eastern extremity, that the majestic peak of the Guacharo rises like an inclined pyramid, its form resembles that of the needles and horns* of the Alps. The savannah we crossed to the Indian village of Santa Cruz is composed of several smooth plateaux, lying above each other like terraces.
We reached the rocky pass at last, and then, muffling the feet of the mules with the coffee-bags, we took them cautiously on the intelligent beasts clambering carefully and with hardly a sound when we led them right in for some distance, gave them the maize we had brought, and then sat down in the darkness listening to their crunching of the grain and the loud cries of the guacharo birds as they flew in and out, fortifying ourselves the while with a hearty meal Tom foregoing his pipe for reasons of cautious tendency.
Thunder rolled at a distance; the clouds seemed suspended on the top of the lofty mountains of the Guacharo; and the plaintive howling of the araguatoes, which we had so often heard at Caripe, denoted the proximity of the storm. We now for the first time had a near view of these howling apes.
A little agility took us to the mouth of the rift; and now, candle in hand, we could see the passage through which we had travelled so laboriously, to find it the easiest of any crevice we had traversed, the floor being deeply covered with guano, as was the case with the bird-chamber when we entered it, at last, to find a vast hall of irregular shape, swarming with the guacharo, or butter-bird of South America a great night-jar, passing its days in these fastnesses of nature, but sallying out at dark to feed.
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