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Updated: May 10, 2025
Mary Redcliff, or even of King's College, is as clumsy as all man's works are beside the works of God; and beyond the Moriche wood, ostrich plumes packed close round madder-brown stems, formed a wall to our temple, which bore such tracery, carving, painting, as would have stricken dumb with awe and delight him who ornamented the Loggie of the Vatican.
Only here and there, as at Aripo, are left patches, as it were, of a third Flora, which once spread uninterruptedly along the southern base of the Cordillera and over the lowland which is now the Gulf of Paria, along the alluvial flats of the mighty stream; and the Moriche palms of Aripo may be the lineal descendants of those which now inhabit the Llanos of the main; as those again may be the lineal descendants of the Moriches which Schomburgk found forming forests among the mountains of Guiana, up to four thousand feet above the sea.
Beyond it rose a double forest of Moriche fan-palms; and to the right of them high wood with giant Mombins and undergrowth of Cocorite a paradise on the other side of the Stygian pool. We walked, with some misgivings, on to the asphalt, and found it perfectly hard.
Delicious they are, and precious, to monkeys and parrots, as well as to the Orinoco Indians, among whom the Tamanacs, according to Humboldt, say, that when a man and woman survived that great deluge, which the Mexicans call the age of water, they cast behind them, over their heads, the fruits of the Moriche palm, as Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones, and saw the seeds in them produce men and women, who repeopled the earth.
The mere sight of it produces an agreeable sensation of coolness, and when loaded with scaly fruit, it contrasts singularly with the mournful aspect of the palma de cobija, the foliage of which is always grey and covered with dust. The effect is confounded with the cause. The moriche grows best in moist places; and it may rather be said that the water attracts the tree.
Whole tribes of Indians, amounting to many thousands of individuals, subsist entirely upon these animals, as the Laplander upon the reindeer, or the Guarani Indian upon the moriche palm. Their blankets are buffalo-robes, part of their clothing buffalo-leather, their tents are buffalo-hides, and buffalo-beef is their sole food for three parts of the year.
A striking difference at present exists between the Guayquerias, a civilized tribe of skilled fishermen, and those savage Guaraounos of the Orinoco, who suspend their habitations on the trunks of the Moriche palm. The population of Cumana has been singularly exaggerated, but according to the most authentic registers it does not exceed 16,000 souls.
So ends his voyage, in which, he says, 'from myself I have deserved no thanks, for I am returned a beggar and withered. The only thing which, as far as I can find, he brought home was some of the delicious scaly peaches of the Moriche palm the Arbol de Vida, or tree of life, which gives sustenance and all else needful to whole tribes of Indians.
We rode away again, and into the 'Morichal, the hills where Moriche palms are found; to see certain springs and a certain tree; and well worth seeing they were. Out of the base of a limestone hill, amid delicate ferns, under the shade of enormous trees, a clear pool bubbled up and ran away, a stream from its very birth, as is the wont of limestone springs.
For the want of human beings fit for all that beauty, man is alone to blame; and when we saw approach us, as the only priest of such a temple, a wild brown man, who feeds his hogs on Moriche fruit and Mombin plums, and whose only object was to sell us an ant-eater's skin, we thought to ourselves knowing the sad history of the West Indies what might this place have become, during the three hundred and fifty years which have elapsed since Columbus first sailed round it, had men calling themselves Christian, calling themselves civilised possessed any tincture of real Christianity, of real civilisation?
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