The town of Cumana, capital of New Andalusia, lies a mile from the landing-stage or the boca battery where we stepped ashore after crossing the bar of the Manzanares river. We had to traverse a vast plain (el salado) between the Guaiqueri dwellings and the coast. The reverberation from the parched land increased the intense heat. The thermometer, plunged into the white sand, reached 37.7'C. The first plant we gathered from American soil was the Avicennia tomentosa (Mangle prieto), which scarcely reaches 2 feet high here. This shrub, with the sesuvium, the yellow gomphrena and the cacti, covered a ground saturated with soda salts; they belong to the scant social plants like European heaths, and in the torrid zone thrive only on the seashore and high in the Andean plateaux.