The banks of the river were sandy and sterile, and the soil contained much small quartz. The bed rock was a talcose schist near to Ocotal, but higher up the river it changed to gneissoid and quartz rocks, the latter in hard and massive beds. As we ascended the valley, the ranges bounding it got higher and steeper, the soil more sandy and barren, with scattered pine trees growing amongst the rocks. 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. The little town was not half populated, the silver-mines had been closed for some time, most of the houses were empty, and the people still clinging about the place seemed to have nothing to do, for the land is too barren for cultivation. We made known our requirements for labourers, and were assured that plenty would be glad to go to Santo Domingo. They would not, however, bind themselves there, but preferred to go down untrammelled with any conditions about pay or work, and I may anticipate here by saying that the result of our visit was very satisfactory, numbers of workmen having been obtained for the mines. After getting some breakfast at a house that seemed to be the hotel of Depilto, we set out to visit a silver-mine named "El Coquimba." We had to ascend a high range opposite the town, and found riding over the steep bare exposures of quartz rock so difficult and dangerous that about half way up we tied our mules to some young pine trees and proceeded on foot. The mine was abandoned, and the shafts and levels were closed by falls of rock. Some of the ore, sulphide of silver, was lying at the mouth of one of the old shafts. Our guide told us that the lode was two feet wide. Both it and the containing rock was very hard, and the miners had also water to contend against. I do not think from what I saw that the mine could be made to pay on a large scale, though next the surface small remunerative deposits of ore had been found. In depth the hardness of the rocks would make the sinking of shafts and driving of levels, the "dead work" of the miners, very costly.