In the margin and bed only of the river are the rocks inscribed. On the margin they extend in some instances to fifteen or twenty yards. Except in the rainy season the stream is dry. The rock is a silicious schist of excessively hard and flinty texture. The marks have the appearance of having been made with a blunt heavy tool, such as might be made with an almost worn-out mason’s hammer.
The situation is about midway between Serra Grande or Ibiapaba and Serra Merioca, about seventy miles from the coast and forty west of the town Sobral. There are not any indications of works of art or other antiquarian remains, nor anything peculiar to the locality. The country is gently undulating, and of the usual character that obtains for hundreds of miles extending along the base of the Serra Ibiapaba.
The native population attribute all the ‘Letreiros’ (inscriptions), as they do everything else of which they have no information, to the Dutch as records of hidden wealth. The Dutch, however, only occupied the country for a few years in the early part of the seventeenth century. Along the coast numerous forts, the works of the Dutch, still remain; but there are no authentic records of their ever having established themselves in the interior of the country, and less probability still of their amusing themselves with inscribing puzzling hieroglyphics, which must have been a work of time, on the rocks of the far interior, for the admiration of wandering Indians.
Dr. J. J. Von Tschudi mentions in his Travels in Peru during the years 1838-1842, [Wiley and Putnam’s Library, Vols. XCIII-XCIV, New York, 1847,] Pt. II, p. 345-346, that the ancient Peruvians also used a certain kind of “hieroglyphics” which they engraved in stone, and preserved in their temples. Notices of these “hieroglyphics” are given by some of the early writers. There appears to be a great similarity between these Peruvian pictographs and those found in Mexico and Brazil.
The temptation to quote from Charles Wiener’s magnificent work Pérou et Bolivie, Paris, 1880, and also from La Antigüedad del Hombre en el Plata, by Florentine Ameghino, Paris (and Buenos Aires), 1880, must be resisted.
The objects depicted in pictographs of all kinds are too numerous and varied for any immediate attempt at classification. Those upon the petroglyphs may, however, be usefully grouped. Instructive particulars regarding them, may be discovered, for instance the delineation of the fauna in reference to its present or former habitat in the region where the representation of it is found, is of special interest.