orant inhabitants of plains are prone to clothe
the mountains that bound their horizon with fanciful and superstitious
attributes. Thus the wandering tribes of the prairies, who often
behold clouds gathering round the summits of these hills, and lightning
flashing, and thunder pealing from them, when all the neighboring
plains are serene and sunny, consider them the abode of the genii or
thunder-spirits who fabricate storms and tempests. On entering their
defiles, therefore, they often hang offerings on the trees, or place
them on the rocks, to propitiate the invisible "lords of the mountains,"
and procure good weather and successful hunting; and they attach unusual
significance to the echoes which haunt the precipices. This superstition
may also have arisen, in part, from a natural phenomenon of a singular
nature. In the most calm and serene weather, and at all times of the
day or night, successive reports are now and then heard among these
mountains, resembling the discharge of several pieces of artillery.
Similar reports were heard by Messrs. Lewis and Clarke in the Rocky
Mountains, which they say were attributed by the Indians to the bursting
of the rich mines of silver contained in the bosom of the mountains.

In fact, these singular explosions have received fanciful explanations
from learned men, and have not been satisfactorily accounted for even by
philosophers. They are said to occur frequently in Brazil. Vasconcelles,
Jesuit father, describes one which he heard in the Sierra, or mountain
region of Piratininga, and which he compares to the discharges of a park
of artillery. The Indians told him that it was an explosion of stones.
The worthy father had soon a satisfactory proof of the truth of their
information, for the very place was found where a rock had burst and
exploded from its entrails a stony mass, like a bomb-shell, and of the
size of a bull's heart. This mass was broken either in its ejection or
its fall, and wonderful was the internal organization revealed. It had a
shell harder even than iron; within which were arranged, like the
seeds of a pomegranate, jewels of various colors; some transparent
as crystals; others of a fine red, and others of mixed hues. The same
phenomenon is said to occur occasionally in the adjacent province of
Guayra, where stones of the bigness of a man's hand are exploded, with
a loud noise, from the bosom of the earth, and scatter about glittering
and beautiful fragments that