Art. XV.--Account of the Great Cavern of the Guacharo.

By Baron Alexander de Humboldt .

Abridged from his Personal Narrative, vol. iii.

What gives most celebrity to the valley of Caripe, beside the extraordinary coolness of the climate, is the great Cueva or Cavern of the Guacharo.

In a country where the people love what is marvellous, a cavern that gives birth to a river, and is inhabited by thousands of nocturnal birds, the fat of which is employed in the Missions to dress food, is an everlasting object of conversation and discussion.

Scarcely has a stranger arrived at Cumana, when he is told of the stone of Araya for the eyes; of the labourer of Arenas who suckled his child; and of the cavern of Guacharo, which is said to be several leagues in length; till he is tired of hearing of them.

A lively interest in the phenomena of nature is preserved wherever society may be said to be without life; where, in dull monotony, it presents only simple relations little fitted to excite the ardour of curiosity.

The cavern, which the natives call a mine of fat, is not in the valley of Caripe itself, but at three short leagues distance from the convent, towards the west-south-west.

It opens into a lateral valley, which terminates at the Sierra del Guacharo.

We set out toward the Sierra on the 18th of September, accompanied by the Alcaids, or Indian magistrates, and the greater part of the monks of the Convent.

A narrow path led us at first during an hour and a half toward the south, across a fine plain, covered with a beautiful turf.

We then turned toward the west, along a small river, which issues from the mouth of the cavern.

We ascended during three quarters of an hour, walking sometimes in the water, which was shallow, sometimes between the torrent and a wall of rocks, on a soil extremely slippery and miry.

The falling down of the earth, the scattered trunks of trees over which the mules could scarcely pass, and the creeping plants that covered the ground, rendered this part of the road fatiguing.

At the foot of the lofty mountain of Guacharo, we were only four hundred steps from the cavern, without yet perceiving the entrance.

The torrent runs in a crevice, which has been hollowed out by the waters; and we went on under a cornice, the projection of which prevented us from seeing the sky.

The path winds like the river: at the last turning we came suddenly before the immense opening of the grotto.

The aspect of this spot is majestic even to the eye of a traveller accustomed to the picturesque scenes of the higher Alps.

I had before this seen the caverns of the Peak of Derbyshire, where, extended in a boat, we traversed a subterranean river, under a vault of two feet high.

I had visited the beautiful grotto of Treshemienshiz, in the Carpathian Mountains, the caverns of the Hartz, and those of Franconia, which are vast cemeteries of bones of tygers, hyenas, and bears, as large as our horses.

Nature in every zone follows immutable laws in the distribution of rocks, in the exterior form of mountains, and even in those tumultuous changes, which the exterior crust of our planet has undergone.

So great a uniformity led me to believe, that the aspect of the cavern of Caripe would differ little from what I had observed in my preceding travels.

The reality far exceeded my expectations.

If the configuration of the grottoes, the splendor of the stalactites, and all the phenomena of inorganic nature, present striking analogies, the majesty of equinoxial vegetation gives at the same time an individual character to the aperture of the cavern.

The mould, that has covered for thousands of years the soil of the caverns of Gaylenreuth and Muggendorf in Franconia, emits even now choke-damps, or gaseous mixtures of hydrogen and nitrogen, that rise to the roof of these caves.

This fact is known to all those who shew these caverns to travellers; and when I had the direction of the mines of the Fichtelberg, I observed it frequently in the summer time.

The Cueva del Guacharo is pierced in the vertical profile of a rock.

The entrance is toward the south, and forms a vault eighty feet broad, and seventy-two feet high.

This elevation is but a fifth less than that of the colonnade of the Louvre.

The rock, that surmounts the grotto, is covered with trees of gigantic height.

The mammee-tree, and the genipa with large and shining leaves, raise their branches vertically toward the sky; while those of the courbaril and the erythrina form, as they extend themselves, a thick vault of verdure.

Plants of the family of pothos with succulent stems, oxalises, and orchideae of a singular structure, rise in the driest clefts of the rocks; while creeping plants, waving in the winds, are interwoven in festoons before the opening of the cavern.

We distinguished in these festoons a bignonia of a violet-blue, the purple dolichos, and for the first time that magnificent olandra, the orange flower of which has a fleshy tube more than four inches long.

The entrances of grottoes, like the view of cascades, derive their principal charm from the situation, more or less majestic, in which they are placed, and which in some sort determines the character of the landscape.

What a contrast between the Cueva of Caripe, and those caverns of the North crowned with oaks and gloomy larch-trees!

But this luxury of vegetation embellishes not only the outside of the vault, it appears even in the vestibule of the grotto.

We saw with astonishment plantain-leaved heliconias eighteen feet high, the praga palm-tree, and arborescent arums, follow the banks of the river even to those subterranean places.

The vegetation continues in the cave of Caripe, as in those deep crevices of the Andes, half excluded from the light of day; and does not disappear, till, advancing in the interior, we reach thirty or forty paces from the entrance.

We measured the way by means of a cord; and we went on about four hundred and thirty feet, without being obliged to light our torches.

Day-light penetrates even into this region, because the grotto forms but one single channel, which keeps the same direction from southeast to north-west.

Where the light begins to fail, we heard from afar the hoarse sounds of the nocturnal birds, sounds which the natives think belong exclusively to those subterraneous places.

The guacharo is of the size of our fowls, has the mouth of the goatsuckers and procnias, and the port of those vultures, the crooked beak of which is surrounded with stiff silky hairs.

It forms a new genus, very different from the goatsucker by the force of its voice, by the considerable strength of its beak, containing a double tooth, by its feet without the membranes that unite the anterior phalanxes of the claws.

It is the first example of a nocturnal bird among the passeres dentirostrati.

In its manners it has analogies both with the goatsuckers and the alpine crow.

The plumage of the guacharo is of a dark bluish-grey, mixed with small streaks and specks of black.

Large white spots, which have the form of a heart, and which are bordered with black, mark the head, the wings, and the tail.

The eyes of the bird are hurt by the blaze of day; they are blue, and smaller than those of the goatsuckers.

The spread of the wings, which are composed of seventeen or eighteen quill feathers, is three feet and a half.

The guacharo quits the cavern at night-fall, especially when the moon shines.

It is almost the only frugiferous nocturnal bird that is yet known; the conformation of its feet sufficiently shows, that it does not hunt like our owls.

It feeds on very hard fruits; as the nut-cracker and pyrrhocorax.

The latter nestles also in clefts of rocks, and is known under the name of night-crow.

The Indians assured us, that the guacharo does not pursue either the lamellicornous insects, or those phalaenae which serve as food to the goatsuckers.

It is sufficient to compare the beaks of the guacharo and goatsucker, to conjecture how much their manners must differ.

It is difficult to form an idea of the horrible noise occasioned by thousands of these birds in the dark part of the cavern; and which can only be compared to the croaking of our crows, which, in the pine forests of the north, live in society, and construct their nests upon trees, the tops of which touch each other.

The shrill and piercing cries of the guacharoes strike upon the vaults of the rocks, and are repeated by the echo in the depth of the cavern.

The Indians showed us the nests of these birds, by fixing torches to the end of a long pole.

These nests were fifty or sixty feet high above our heads, in holes in the shape of funnels, with which the roof of the grotto is pierced like a sieve.

The noise increased as we advanced, and the birds were affrighted by the light of the torches of copal.

When this noise ceased around us, we heard at a distance the plaintive cries of the birds roosting in other ramifications of the cavern.

It seemed as if these bands answered each other alternately.

The Indians enter into the Cueva del Guacharo once ayear, near midsummer, armed with poles, by means of which they destroy the greater part of the nests.

At this season several thousands of birds are killed; and the old ones, as if to defend their brood, hover around the heads of the Indians, uttering terrible cries.

The young, which fall to the ground, are opened on the spot.

Their peritoneum is extremely loaded with fat, and a layer of fat reaches from the abdomen to the anus, forming a kind of cushion between the legs of the bird.

This quantity of fat in frugiferous animals, not exposed to the light, and exerting very little muscular motion, reminds us of what has been long since observed in the fattening of geese and oxen.

It is well known how favourable darkness and repose are to this process.

The nocturnal birds of Europe are lean, because, instead of feeding on fruits like the guacharo, they live on the scanty produce of their prey.

At the period which is commonly called at Caripe the oil harvest, the Indians build huts with palm leaves, near the entrance, and even in the porch of the cavern.

Of these we still saw some remains.

There, with a fire of brushwood, they melt in pots of clay the fat of the young birds just killed.

This fat is known by the name of butter or oil (manteca or aceite) of the guacharo.

It is half liquid, transparent, without smell, and so pure that it may be kept above a year without becoming rancid.

At the convent of Caripe no other oil is used in the kitchen of the monks but that of the cavern; and we never observed, that it gave the aliments a disagreeable taste or smell.

The quantity of this oil collected little corresponds with the carnage made every year in the grotto by the Indians.

It appears that they do not get above 150 or 160 bottles (sixty cubic inches each) of very pure manteca; the rest, less transparent, is preserved in large earthen vessels.

This branch of industry reminds us of the harvest of pigeon's oil , of which some thousands of barrels were formerly collected in Carolina.

At Caripe, the use of the oil of guacharoes is very ancient, and the missionaries have only regulated the method of extracting it.

The members of an Indian family, which bears the name of Morocomas, pretend, as descendants of the first colonists of the valley, to be the lawful proprietors of the cavern, and arrogate to themselves the monopoly of the fat; but, thanks to the monastic institutions, their rights at present are merely honorary.

In conformity to the system of the missionaries, the Indians are obliged to furnish guacharo-oil for the church-lamp: the rest, we were assured, is purchased of them.

We shall not decide either on the legitimacy of the rights of the Morocomas, or on the origin of the obligation imposed on the natives by the monks.

It would seem natural, that the produce of the chace should belong to those who hunt:

but in the forests of the New World, as in the centre of European cultivation, public right is modified according to the relations which are established between the strong and the weak, the victors and the vanquished.

This pigeon oil comes from the columba migratoria, (Pennant's Arctic Zoology, vol. ii. p. 13.)

The race of the guacharoes would have been long ago extinct, had not several circumstances contributed to its preservation.

The natives, restrained by their superstitious ideas, have seldom the courage to penetrate far into the grotto.

It appears, also, that birds of the same species dwell in neighbouring caverns, which are too narrow to be accessible to man.

Perhaps the great cavern is repeopled by colonies, that abandon the small grottoes, for the missionaries assured us, that hitherto no sensible diminution of the birds had been observed.

Young guacharoes have been sent to the port of Cumana, and have lived there several days without taking any nourishment; the seeds offered to them not suiting their taste.

When the crops and gizzards of the young birds are opened in the cavern, they are found to contain all sorts of hard and dry fruits, which furnish, under the singular name of guacharo seed, semilla del guacharo, a very celebrated remedy against intermittent fevers.

The old birds carry these seeds to their young.

They are carefully collected, and sent to the sick at Cariaco, and other places of the low regions, where fevers are prevalent.

We followed, as we continued our progress through the cavern, the banks of the small river which issued from it, and is from twenty-eight to thirty feet wide.

We walked on the banks, as far as the hills formed of calcareous incrustations permitted us.

When the torrent winds among very high masses of stalactites, we were often obliged to descend into its bed, which is only two feet in depth.

We learnt, with surprise, that this subterraneous rivulet is the origin of the river Caripe, which, at a few leagues distance, after having joined the small river of Santa Maria, is navigable for canoes.

It enters into the river Areo under the name of Canno de Terezen.

We found on the banks of the subterraneous rivulet a great quantity of palm-tree wood, the remains of trunks, on which the Indians climb to reach the nests hanging to the roofs of the cavern.

The rings, formed by the vestiges of the old footstalks of the leaves, furnish as it were the footsteps of a ladder perpendicularly placed.

The Grotto of Caripe preserves the same direction, the same breadth, and its primitive height of sixty or seventy feet, to the distance of 1458 feet, accurately measured.

I have never seen a cavern in either continent, of so uniform and regular a construction.

We had great difficulty in persuading the Indians to pass beyond the outer part of the grotto, the only part which they annually visit to collect the fat.

The whole authority of los padres was necessary, to induce them to advance as far as the spot where the soil rises abruptly at an inclination of sixty degrees, and where the torrent forms a small subterraneous cascade . The natives connect mystic ideas with this cave, inhabited by nocturnal birds; they believe, that the souls of their ancestors sojourn in the deep recesses of the cavern.

"Man," say they, should avoid places which are enlightened neither by the Sun nor by the Moon."

To go and join the guacharoes, is to rejoin their fathers, is to die.

The magicians and the poisoners perform their nocturnal tricks at the entrance of the cavern, to conjure the chief of the evil spirits.

We find this phenomenon of a subterranean cascade, but on a much larger scale, in England at Yordas Cave, near Kingsdale, in Yorkshire.

At the point where the river forms the subterraneous cascade, a hill covered with vegetation, which is opposite the opening of the grotto, presents itself in a very picturesque manner.

It appears at the extremity of a straight passage, 240 toises in length.

The stalactites, which descend from the vault, and which resemble columns suspended in the air, display themselves on a back-ground of verdure.

The opening of the cavern appeared singularly contracted, when we saw it about the middle of the day, illumined by the vivid light reflected at once from the sky, the plants, and the rocks.

The distant light of day formed somewhat of magical contrast with the darkness that surrounded us in those vast caverns.

We discharged our pieces at a venture, wherever the cries of the nocturnal birds, and the flapping of their wings, led us to suspect that a great number of nests were crowded together.

After several fruitless attempts, M. Bonpland succeeded in killing a couple of guacharoes, which, dazzled by the light of the torches, seemed to pursue us.

This circumstance afforded me the means of drawing this bird, which hitherto had remained unknown to naturalists.

We climbed, not without some difficulty, the small hill, whence the subterraneous rivulet descends.

We saw that the grotto was perceptibly contracted, retaining only forty feet in height; and that it continued stretching to the north-east, without deviating from its primitive direction, which is parallel to that of the great valley of Caripe.

In this part of the cavern, the rivulet deposits a blackish mould, very like the matter which, in the grotto of Muggendorf in Franconia, is called the earth of sacrifice.

We could not discover, whether this fine and spongy mould fall through the cracks which communicate with the surface of the ground above, or be washed down by the rain-water that penetrates into the cavern.

It was a mixture of silex, alumen, and vegetable detritus.

We walked in thick mud to a spot, where we beheld with astonishment the progress of subterraneous vegetation.

The seeds, which the birds carry into the grotto to feed their young, spring up wherever they can fix in the mould, that covers the calcareous incrustations.

Blanched stalks, with some half-formed leaves, had risen to the height of two feet.

It was impossible to ascertain the species of plants, the form, colour, and aspect of which had been changed by the absence of light.

Those traces of organization amid darkness, forcibly excited the curiosity of the natives, in general so stupid, and difficult to be moved.

They examined them in that silent meditation inspired by a place they seemed to dread.

It might be thought, that these subterraneous vegetables, pale and disfigured, appeared to them phantoms banished from the face of the earth.

To me the scene recalled one of the happiest periods of my early youth, a long abode in the mines of Freiberg, where I made experiments on the effects of blanching, which are very different, according as the air is pure, or overcharged with hydrogen or azote.

The missionaries, with all their authority, could not prevail on the Indians to penetrate farther into the cavern.

As the vault grew lower, the cries of the guacharoes became more shrill.

We were obliged to yield to the pusillanimity of our guides, and trace back our steps.

The appearance of the cavern was indeed very uniform.

We find, that a bishop of St Thomas of Guiana had gone farther than ourselves.

He had measured nearly 2500 feet from the mouth to the spot where he stopped, though the cavern reached farther.

The remembrance of this fact was preserved in the convent of Caripe, without the exact period being noted.

The bishop had provided himself with great torches of white wax of Castile.

We had torches composed only of the bark of trees and native resin.

The thick smoke which issues from these torches, in a narrow subterranean passage, hurts the eye, and obstructs the respiration.

We followed the course of the torrent to go out of the cavern.

Before our eyes were dazzled with the light of day, we saw, without the grotto, the water of the river sparkling amid the foliage of the trees that concealed it.

It was like a picture placed in the distance, and to which the mouth of the cavern served as a frame.

Having at length reached the entrance, and seated ourselves on the bank of the rivulet, we rested after our fatigues.

We were glad to be beyond the hoarse cries of the birds, and to leave a place where darkness does not offer even the charm of silence and tranquillity.

We could scarcely persuade ourselves, that the name of the Grotto of Caripe had hitherto remained unknown in Europe.

The guacharoes alone would have been sufficient to render it celebrated.

These nocturnal birds have been nowhere yet discovered, except in the mountains of Caripe and Cumanacoa.

The cavern of Caripe, situated nearly in the latitude of 10° 10', consequently in the centre of the torrid zone, is elevated 506 toises above the level of the water in the Gulf of Cariaco.

We found in every part of it, in the month of September, the temperature of the interior air between 64°.6 and 66° of Fahrenheit; the external atmosphere being at 61°.2.

At the entrance of the cavern, the thermometer in the air was at 63°.7, but when immersed in the water of the little subterraneous river, it marked, even to the end of the cavern, 62°.2.