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The chain of mountains, bordering the lake of Tacarigua towards the south, forms in some sort the northern shore of the great basin of the Llanos or savannahs of Caracas. To descend from the valleys of Aragua into these savannahs, it is necessary to cross the mountains of Guigue and of Tucutunemo. From a peopled country embellished by cultivation, we plunge into a vast solitude.
The grunsteins of Tucutunemo, which we consider as constituting the same formation as the serpentine rock, contain veins of malachite and copper-pyrites. These same metalliferous combinations are found also in Franconia, in the grunsteins of the mountains of Steben and Lichtenberg.
But the success of the workings, which depends less on the abundance of the ore in a vast space of land than on its accumulation in one point, has not justified these favourable prepossessions. The mountain of Chacao, bordered by the ravine of Tucutunemo, rises seven hundred feet above the village of San Juan.
We saw in the mountains of Upper Orinoco, or of Parime, only granular granites containing a little hornblende, granites passing into gneiss, and schistoid hornblendes. Has nature repeated on the east of Esmeralda, between the sources of the Carony, the Essequibo, the Orinoco, and the Rio Branco, the transition-formation of Tucutunemo reposing on mica-schist?
We have indicated above a layer of granitiferous serpentine inclosed in the gneiss of Buenavista, or perhaps superposed on that rock; we here find a real stratum of serpentine alternating with diorite, and extending from the ravine of Tucutunemo as far as Juncalito.
On the south of the Cerro de Chacao, between the ravine of Tucutunemo and Piedras Negras, the gneiss is concealed beneath a formation of serpentine, of which the composition varies in the different superimposed strata.
Balls of this amygdaloid are enclosed in the grunstein; and this grunstein alternates on one side with a green slate, on the other with the serpentine of Tucutunemo.
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.
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