We waited nearly the whole day in the miserable village of Mahates for the animals carrying our belongings to the landing-stage on the Magdalena river. It was suffocatingly hot; at this time of year there is not a breath of wind. Feeling depressed we lay on the ground in the main square. My barometer had broken and it was the last one I had. I had anticipated measuring the slope of the river and fixing the speed of its current and the position of different stages through astronomical observations. Only travelers know how painful it is to suffer such accidents, which continued to dog me in the Andes and in Mexico; each time this happened I felt the same. Of all the instruments a traveler should carry the barometer is the one, despite all its imperfections, that caused me the most worry and whose loss I felt the most. Only chronometers, which sometimes suddenly and unpredictably change their rates, give rise to the same sense of loss. Indeed, after travelling thousands of leagues over land with astronomical and physical instruments, you are tempted to cry out: 'Lucky are those who travel without instruments that break, without dried plants that get wet, without animal collections that rot; lucky are those who travel the world to see it with their own eyes, trying to understand it, and recollecting the sweet emotions that nature inspires!

May 1st. The Indians wanted to leave long before sunrise. We got up before them because we had hoped to see some stars, but in this humid, thick-jungled zone the nights were getting darker and darker as we approached the Río Negro and the interior of Brazil. We stayed in the river until dawn, fearing to get lost in the trees. But as soon as the sun rose we went through the flooded jungle to avoid the strong current. We reached the confluence of the Temi and Tuamini and went upstream on the latter south-west, reaching the Javita mission on the banks of the Tuamini at about eleven in the morning. It was at this Christian mission that we hoped to find help in carrying our pirogue to the Río Negro. A minor accident shows how fearful the little sagouin monkeys are. The noise of the 'blowers' seared one of them and it fell into the water. These monkeys can hardly swim, and we just managed to save it.

The guàcharo is about the size of our chickens, with the mouth of our goatsuckers and the gait of vultures, with silky stiff hair around their curved beaks. The plumage is of a dark bluish-grey with small streaks and black dots; great white patches in the shape of a heart, bordered with black, mark its wings, head and tail. Its eyes are wounded by daylight; they are blue and smaller than those of the goatsuckers or flying frogs. The wing-span, seventeen or eighteen quill feathers, is 3. feet. The guàcharo leaves the cave at nightfall when there is a moon. It is the only grain-eating nocturnal bird that we know of to date; the structure of its feet shows that it does not hunt like our owls. It eats hard seed, like the nutcracker (bullfinch). The Indians insist that the guàcharo does not chase beetles or moths like the goatsucker. It is sufficient to compare their beaks to be convinced that they lead completely different lives.

On leaving Spain I had promised to join his expedition wherever I could reach it. Bonpland, as active and optimistic as usual, and I immediately decided to split our herbals into three lots to avoid the risk of losing what had taken so much trouble to collect on the banks of the Orinoco, Atabapo and Río Negro. We sent one collection by way of England to Germany, another via Càdiz to France, and the third we left in Havana. We had reason to congratulate ourselves on this prudence. Each collection contained virtually the same species; if the cases were taken by pirates there were instructions to send them to Sir Joseph Banks or to the natural history museum in Paris. Luckily I did not send my manuscripts to Càdiz with our friend and fellow traveler Father Juan Gonzalez, who left Cuba soon after us but whose vessel sank off Africa, with the loss of all life. We lost duplicates of our herbal collection, and all the insects Bonpland had gathered. For over two years we did not receive one letter from Europe; and those we got in the following three years never mentioned earlier letters. You may easily guess how nervous I was about sending a journal with my astronomical observations and barometrical measurements when I had not had the patience to make a copy. After visiting New Granada, Peru and Mexico I happened to be reading a scientific journal in the public library in Philadelphia and saw: 'M. de Humboldt's manuscripts have arrived at his brother's house in Paris via Spain. I could scarcely suppress an exclamation of joy.

There we met the district corregidor, Don Alejandro Mejía, an amiable and well-educated man. He gave us three Indians who would cut us a path through the jungle with machetes. In this country, where people rarely travel, the vegetation is so fertile that a man on horseback can barely make his way along the jungle paths tangled with liana and branches during the rainy season. To our great annoyance the Catuaro missionary insisted on leading us to Cariaco, and we could not decline his offer. He told us a dreadful story. The independence movement, which had nearly broken out in 1798, had been preceded and followed by trouble among the slaves at Cariaco. An unfortunate negro had been condemned to death and our host was going to Cariaco to give him some spiritual comfort. How tedious this journey became. We could not escape talking about 'the necessity of slavery, the innate wickedness of the blacks, and how slavery benefited Christians'!

We rested at the foot of the caverns from which the flames have issued more and more frequently as the years have passed. Our guides and the farmer, equally familiar with the local terrain, discussed, in the manner of the creoles, the dangers to which Cumanacoa might be exposed if the Cuchivano became an active volcano and 'se veniesse a reventar' (might explode). It was obvious to them that since the great earthquakes of Quito and Cumanà in 1797 New Andalusia was every day more and more undermined by subterranean fires. They cited the flames that had been seen coming out of the ground at Cumanà, and the tremors in places where there had not been any before. They remembered that in Macarapàn sulphurous smells had been noted over the last months. We were struck by these facts on which they had based their predictions, which nearly all turned out to be true. In 1812 enormous damage was done in Caracas, proof of the incredible instability of nature in the north-east of Terra Firma.