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Show CATAR.lCT OF THE ORINOCO. 179 more than eighty feet drawings of the sun and moon, and of many animals, particularly crocodile and boa , cngra.ven or arranged almo tin row or lines. Without :u·tificial aid, it would now be impossible to a cend this perpendicular precipice, which deserves to be carefully examined by future tra:vellers. The hieroglyphical rock engravings on the mountains of Uruana. and Encaramada are equally remarkable in respect to ituation. If one a~ks the native how these figures can have been cut in the rocks, they an wer that it was done when the waters were so high that their father' boats were only a little lower than the drawings. Those rude memorials of human art would in such case have belonged to the same age as a state of the waters implying a distribution of land and water very different from that which now prevails, and belonging to an earlier condition of the earth's surface; which must not, however, be confounded with that in which the earlier vegetation which adorned our planet, the gigantic bodies of extinct land animals, and the oceanic creatures of a more chaotic state, became entombed in the indurating crust of globe. At the northernmost extremity of the Cataracts, attention is excited by what are called the natural drawings or pictures of the sun and moon. The rock Keri, to which I have several times referred, has received its name from a white spot which is conspicuous from a groo.t distance, and in which the Indians have thought they recognized a remarkable similarity to the disk of the full moon. I was not myself able to climb the steep precipice, but the white mark in question is probably a large knot of quartz formed by a cluster of veins in the grayish-black granite. Opposite to the Keri rock, on the twin mountain of the Island of Uivitari, which has a basaltic appearance, the Indians show with mysterious admiration a similar disk, which they venerate as the image of the sun, Camosi. Perhaps the geographical position of the two rocks may have contributed to these denominations, as the Keri (or Moon Rock) is turned to the west, and the Camosi to the east. Some etymologists have thought they recognized in the American word Camosi a similarity to Camosb, the name of the sun in one of the Phoenician dialects, and to Apollo Chomeus, or Beelphegor and Ammon. |