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Updated: June 21, 2025
In the shadow of that solitary sentinel peak her life had been passed; she had gathered chestnuts and chincapins among its wooded clefts, and clambered over its gray boulders as fearlessly as the young llamas of the Parime; and now, as it rapidly receded and finally vanished, she felt as if the last link that bound her to the past had suddenly snapped; the last friendly face which had daily looked down on her for twelve years was shut out forever, and she and Grip were indeed alone, in a great, struggling world of selfishness and sin.
The low regions, which are bounded by the southern and northern declivities of the Parime and Brazil mountains, and which the geologist ought to mark by one name, contain, according to the no less precise language of hydrography, two basins of rivers, those of the Upper Orinoco and the Amazon, separated by a ridge that runs from Javita towards Esmeralda.
The system of the mountains of Parime separates the plains of the Lower Orinoco from those of the Rio Negro and the Amazon; it occupies a territory of trapezoidal form, comprehended between the parallels of 3 and 8 degrees, and the meridians of 61 and 70 1/2 degrees.
It is doubtful whether these masses, which are of cylindrical form, parallelopipedons rounded on the edge, or balls of 40 to 50 feet in diameter, are the effect of a slow decomposition, or of a violent and instantaneous upheaving. The granite of the south-eastern part of Sierra Parime sometimes passes to pegmatite,* composed of laminary felspar, enclosed in curved masses of crystalline quartz.
The lofty mountains of the Parime, which border the northern bank of the Orinoco in the upper part of its course above Esmeralda, send off a chain towards the south, of which the Cerro de Unturan forms one of the principal summits.
The same force which upheaved the whole group of the Sierra Parime has acted here and there in the plains as far as beyond the equator. The existence of these steeps and sporadic hills renders it difficult to determine the precise limits of a system in which the mountains are not longitudinally ranged as in a vein.
The group of the mountains of Parime narrows considerably between the sources of the Orinoco and the mountains of Demerara, in the Sierras of Quimiropaca and Pacaraimo, which divide the waters between the Carony and the Rio Parime, or Rio de Aguas Blancas.
The former of these systems, partly covered by the ocean, may be compared, with respect to its relative position and form, to the Sierra Parime; the latter, to the Brazil chains, running also from south-west to north-east. The culminant points of those two systems rise to 1138 and 1040 toises.
This basin, like the plains of Lombardy, is open to the east. The latter occupy the space between the mountains of Parime and New Grenada. The two parts of this basin have an opposite direction; but being alike covered with gramina, they are usually comprehended in the country under the same denomination.
Those Llanos which form the basin of the Orinoco, and which we crossed twice in one year, in the months of March and July, communicate with the basin of the Amazon and the Rio Negro, bounded on one side by the Cordillera of Chiquitos, and on the other by the mountains of Parime. The opening which is left between the latter and the Andes of New Grenada, occasions this communication.
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