If one asks the natives how these figures can have been cut in the rocks, they answer that it was done when the waters were so high that their fathers’ 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 great distance, and in which the Indians have thought they recognised 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 greyish-black granite. Opposite to the Keri rock, on the twin mountain of the island of Uivitari, which has a basaltic appearance, the Indians shew 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 recognised in the American word Camosi a similarity to Camosh, the name of the Sun in one of the Phœnician dialects, and to Apollo Chomeus, or Beelphegor and Ammon. Unlike the grander falls of Niagara (which are 140 French or 150 English feet high) the “Cataracts of Maypures” are not formed by the single precipitous descent of a vast mass of waters, nor are they “narrows” or passes through which the river rushes with accelerated velocity, as in the Pongo of Manseriche in the River of the Amazons. The Cataracts of Maypures consist of a countless number of little cascades succeeding each other like steps. The “Raudal” (the name given by the Spaniards to this species of cataract) is formed by numerous islands and rocks which so restrict the bed of the river, that out of a breadth of 8000 (8526 E.) feet there often only remains an open channel of twenty feet in width. The eastern side is now much more inaccessible and dangerous than the western.