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up. At the site of the old town the church still stands, but only a few poor negroes live there now. Two branches of the river unite a little below the present town, and following it down for about four days' journey a place named Cocos is reached, which is the furthest settlement of the Spaniards towards the Atlantic. To this point large bungoes come up the river, and Don Pedro had been very wishful to get it opened out above for navigation, but had not succeeded.

There were very few men to be hired at Ocotal, and we determined to go on to Depilto, a small mining town near the Honduranean boundary, where we were assured there were plenty to be obtained. We had only engaged the mules to come as far as Ocotal, and had great difficulty in getting others to go on. I think the people at first were afraid that we might cross the boundary into Honduras, and never return. We afterwards learnt that robberies of mules often take 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, several people in Ocotal who had worked at the mines and knew us, and when this information spread we had the offer of several animals. If we had known the cause of the reluctance of the people to let us have mules at first, we should easily have got over the difficulty by leaving the value of the animals in the hands of some responsible person, but the owners had made all sorts of excuses for not lending them, and we had not suspected the true cause. We had been travelling continually for nine days, and looked more like brigands than honest travellers, and the good easygoing people of Ocotal had their suspicions about us.

Ch. XVI.]

ABUNDANCE OF HAWKS.

257

As I have said, when satisfied of our good faith, the mule owners soon offered us the use of their beasts, and next morning Velasquez and I started at seven o'clock on two fine fresh mules and rode merrily up the valley of the Depilto. The river rises in the high ranges that form the boundary between Honduras and Nicaragua, and running down past Depilto joins the Ocotal river a little below the capital. Our road lay up the valley close to the river, which we crossed and recrossed several times. The vegetation was scanty, but the morning was a lovely one after the thunderstorm of the night before, and we greatly enjoyed our ride. We did not see many birds, a pretty hawk that I shot being the most noticeable. Hawks of various kinds are very abundant in the tropics, and if the small birds had to personify death, they would certainly represent him as a hawk, for this is the form in which he must generally appear to them. Towards evening the hawk glides noiselessly along and alights on a bough near, where he hears the small birds twittering amongst the bushes. Perhaps they see him and are quiet for a little, but he sits motionless as the sphinx, and they soon get over their fear and resume their play or feeding. Then suddenly a dark mass swoops down and rises again. It is the hawk, with a small bird grasped in his strong talons gasping out its last breath. Its comrades are terror-struck for a moment and dash madly into the thickets, but soon forget their fear. They chirp to each other, the scattered birds reunite; there is a fluttering and twittering, a rearranging of mates, then again songs, feeding, love, jealousy, and bickerings.

The banks of the river were sandy and sterile, and the soil contained much small quartz. The bed rock was a

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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 pre"ferred 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

Ch. XIV.]

THE LAURENTIAN FORMATION.

259

at the mouth of one of the old shafts. that the lode was two feet wide.

Our guide told us Both it and the con

taining 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.

We started on our return down the valley at three o'clock, and took particular note of the succession of the rocks, as I had become much interested in finding these quartz and gneissoid beds, which I had no doubt were the same Laurentian rocks that I had seen in Canada and Brazil,-the very backbone of the continent, ribbing America from Patagonia to the Canadas-the fundamental gneiss which is covered in other parts of Central America that I had visited, by strata of much more recent origin. 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 lamina of the rock. On the banks of the river, from about a mile below Depilto, unstratified beds of gravel are exposed in numerous natural sections. These beds deepen as the river is descended, until at Ocotal they reach a thickness of between two and three hundred feet, and the undulating plain on which Ocotal is built is seen in sections near the river to be composed entirely of them. These

unstratified deposits consist mostly of quartz sand with numerous angular and subangular blocks of quartz and talcose schist. Many of the boulders are very large, and in some parts great numbers have been accumulated i the bed of the river by the washing away of the smaller stones and sand. 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. Near Ocotal this unstratified formation is nearly level, excepting where worn into dee gulches by the existing streams. The river has cut through to a depth of over two hundred feet, and there are long precipices of it on both sides, similar to those near streams in the north of England that cut through. thick beds of boulder clay.

The evidences of glacial action between Depilto and Ocotal were, with one exception, as clear as in any Welsh or Highland valley. There were the same rounded and smoothed masses of rock, the same morainelike accumulations of unstratified sand and gravel, the same transported boulders that could be traced to their parent rocks several miles distant. The single exception was, I am convinced, one of observation and not one of fact, viz., I saw no glacial scratches on the rocks; but geologists know how rare these are on natural exposures in districts that have certainly been glaciated, and will not be surprised that in a hurried visit of only a few hours I should not have discovered any. Glacial scratches are seldom preserved on rock surfaces exposed to the action of the elements. Even in Nova Scotia, where

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