The most wonderful of those rock carvings were the footprints of the jaguar (onça), reproduced with such perfection that it seemed almost as if they had been left there by the animal itself. Not so happy were the representations of human heads—one evidently of an Indian chief, with an aureole of feathers, showing a painfully distorted vision on the part of the artist. The eyes were formed by two circles in poor alignment, the nose by a vertical line, and the mouth, not under but by the side of the nose, represented by two concentric curves.
A figure in a sitting posture was interesting enough—like a T upside down, with a globe for a head and a cross-bar for arms. The hands had three fingers each, but there were only two toes to each foot.
It was interesting to note how the sculptors of those images caught, in a rudimentary way, the character of the subjects represented. This was chiefly remarkable in the footprints of birds and other animals, such as deer. They seemed particularly fond of representing deer-horns—sometimes with double lines at an angle. That was possibly to commemorate hunting expeditions. A frequent subject of decoration was a crude representation of the female organ; and one a magnified resemblance, angularly drawn, of an Indian male organ garbed in its typical decoration.
Weird Lunar Effect witnessed by Author.
The face of the rock was absolutely covered with drawings, many being mere reproductions of the same design. Some were so rudimentary that they were absolutely impossible to identify. One fact was certain, that those carvings had been made by men who were trackers by nature and who observed chiefly what they noticed on the ground, instead of around and above them. Thus, there were no representations whatever of foliage or trees, no attempts at reproducing birds, or the sun, the moon, the stars.
The most interesting of all, from an ethnological point of view, were the geometrical designs. They closely resembled the incised lines and punch-marks of the Australian aborigines, and the patterns common in Polynesia. Concentric circles—of more or less perfection—were common, some with a central cross of three and four parallel lines. Coils seemed beyond the drawing powers of Indian artists. Ovals, triangles, squares, the Egyptian cross (T-shaped), series of detached circles (these generally enclosed within a triangle, quadrangle or lozenge) were frequent. Even more frequent were the parallel incised lines, generally used as subsidiary filling or shading of other patterns, such as concentric circles, or sections of triangles or squares.
It may be noted that a certain intelligence was displayed by the artist in dividing circles fairly accurately into four and eight sections, the diameters intersecting pretty well in the centre of the circles. One pattern which seemed to take their fancy was that of an oval or a circle with a number of dots inside.
In examining the cave closely, inside and outside, I also found upon the wall, which was simply covered with those images, some curious marks resembling the letters H P, A P, and W