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Updated: June 21, 2025
The summer was not yet gone. There were Spanish galleons to be attacked. The Johnsons could show where Oxenham had hidden his treasure; and if they had not found Lake Parimé and its city of gold, they had explored much new and wondrously fertile country.
The extent of country which I traversed in different directions was more than 15,400 square leagues. It has already formed the subject of a geological sketch, traced hastily on the spot, after my return from the Orinoco, and published in 1801. At that period the direction of the Cordillera on the coast of Venezuela and the existence of the Cordillera of Parime were unknown in Europe.
These strata are less connected by alternation than by opposition. Porphyritic breccias which envelope the quartzose porphyries. The gem-salt oscillates from zechstein to muschelkalk. Tertiary strata, showing a much smaller number of dicotyledonous plants. These alternations and transitions appeared to me less common in the littoral Cordillera of Venezuela than in the Sierra Parime.
Its most considerable portion lies between the parallels 15 and 22 degrees, opposite the Andes of Potosi and La Paz, but its mean height is five toises less, and cannot even be compared with that of the mountains of Parime, Jura and Auvergne.
These names having also been applied to different tributary streams, have caused many errors in geography. The great Rio Branco, or Parime, often mentioned in this work, is formed by the Urariquera and the Tacutu, and flows, between Carvoeyro and Villa de Moura, into the Rio Negro.
The chain of mountains placed by several modern geographers, between the Meta and the Vichada, and which appears to link the Andes of New Grenada with the Sierra Parime, is altogether imaginary. We have now examined the prolongation of the Sierra Parime on the west, towards the source of the Rio Negro: it remains for us to follow the same group in its eastern direction.
Between the latitudes of 4 and 8 degrees, the Orinoco not only separates the great forest of the Parime from the bare savannahs of the Apure, Meta, and Guaviare, but also forms the boundary between tribes of very different manners.
Considering separately the groups of the east, those of the shore of Venezuela, of the Parime, and Brazil, we see their height diminish from north to south. It is that part of the back where passes are made, which furnishes a precise measure of the minimum of the height of the great chains.
Alps of Switzerland : 2450 : 1150 : 1 : 2.1. Pyrenees : 1787 : 1150 : 1 : 1.5. Littoral Chain of Venezuela : 1350 : 750 : 1 : 1.8. Group of the Mountains of the Parime : 1300 : 500 : 1 : 2.6. Group of the Mountains of Brazil : 900 : 500 : 1 : 2.3. Its height is computed at 2500 toises, and yet at some seasons it is entirely free from snow.
The system of the mountains of Parime surpasses in extent nineteen times that of the whole of Switzerland. In the group of the Parime, as well as in the group of the mountains of central Asia, between the Himalaya and the Altai, the partial chains are often interrupted and have no uniform parallelism.
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