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Lands now submerged must have been uncovered, and on the return of the waters at the close of the glacial period many a peopled lowland must have been overwhelmed in the nearly universal deluge. A Nicaraguan criminal. Geology between Ocotal and Totagalpa. Preparations at Totagalpa for their annual festival. Chicha-drinking. Piety of the Indians. Ancient civilisation of tropical America.
Palacaguina. Hospitality of the Mestizos. Curious custom at the festival at Condego. Cross range between Segovia and Matagalpa. Sontuli. Birds' nests. WE got back to Ocotal, from Depilto, before dark, and made arrangements for setting out on our return to the mines the next morning.
We afterwards learnt that robberies of mules often took place; some rogues making a business of stealing mules out of Honduras, bringing them into Nicaragua, selling them, and stealing others to return with. There were, however, some people in Ocotal who had worked at the mines and knew us, and when this information spread we had the offer of several animals.
Some of these huge boulders were fifteen feet across, the largest of them lying in the bed of the river two miles below Depilto. Most of them were of the Depilto quartz rock and gneiss, and I saw many in the unstratified gravel near Ocotal fully eight miles from their parent rock.
GEOLOGICAL SECTION NEAR OCOTAL. Section of Strata between Depilto and the hill three miles south-west of Ocotal. Gravel with boulders of trap and conglomerate. Gravel with boulders of gneiss and quartz rock. Contorted schists. The evidences of glacial action between Depilto and Ocotal were, with one exception, as clear as in any Welsh or Highland valley.
Near Ocotal this unstratified formation is nearly level, excepting where worn into deep gulches by the existing streams. The river has cut through it to a depth of over two hundred feet, and there are high precipices of it on both sides, similar to those near streams in the North of England that cut through thick beds of boulder clay.
Great, bare, rounded masses of hard quartzite protruded through the scanty soil, and in the river were enormous boulders of granite-like gneiss. Depilto is only nine miles from Ocotal, but we took three hours to reach it, as I made many stoppages to examine the rocks and to catch fleet-limbed speckled tiger-beetles on the sandy roads.
That the transportation of boulders in Nicaragua was due to glaciers, and not to floating icebergs, may be argued on zoological grounds. The transported boulders, near Ocotal, are about three thousand feet above the sea, those near Libertad about two thousand feet.
Our mules and horses were completely tired out; and we expected to have been able, without difficulty, to hire fresh animals to take us on to Ocotal in Segovia; but we were disappointed. We lost the afternoon by depending upon a man who undertook to get us some. He went away, saying he was going after them. Hour after hour passed, and he did not return.
Going down the valley of the Depilto the massive beds of quartz and gneiss are soon succeeded by overlying, highly inclined, and contorted schists, and as far as where the road from Ocotal to Totagalpa crosses the river, the exposures of bed rock were invariably these contorted schists, with many small veins of quartz running between the laminae of the rock.
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