other, and were ready, as I know well, to ’dare all that became a man.’  But every now and then a swell rolled in high enough to have cracked our sculls against the top, and out again deep enough to have staved the boat against the rocks.  If we went to wreck, the current was setting strongly out to sea; and the Boca was haunted by sharks, and (according to the late Colonel Hamilton Smith) by a worse monster still, namely, the giant ray, {111a} which goes by the name of devil-fish on the Carolina shores.  He saw, he says, one of these monsters rise in this very Boca, at a sailor who had fallen overboard, cover him with one of his broad wings, and sweep him down into the depths.  And, on the whole, if Guacharos are precious, so is life.  So, like Gyges of old, we ‘elected to survive,’ and rowed away with wistful eyes, determining to get Guacharos—­a determination which was never carried out—­from one of the limestone caverns of the northern mountains.

And now it may be asked, and reasonably enough, what Guacharos {111b} are; and why five English gentlemen and a canny Scots coastguardman should think it worth while to imperil their lives to obtain them.

I cannot answer better than by giving Humboldt’s account of the Cave of Caripe, on the Spanish main hard by, where he discovered them, or rather described them to civilised Europe, for the first time:—­

’The Cueva del Guacharo is pierced in the vertical profile of a rock.  The entrance is towards the south, and forms a vault eighty feet broad and seventy-two feet high.  This elevation is but a fifth less than 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 towards 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 construction, 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 Solandra, 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-trees, and arborescent Arums follow the banks of the river, even to those subterranean places.  The vegetation continues in the Cave of Caripe, as in the 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. . . .