The town of Cumana itself stretches from the San Antonio fort to the small Manzanares and Santa Catalina rivers. The delta formed by the former is fertile, covered with mammees, sapotas (achra), banana trees and other plants cultivated by the Indians in their charas. (27) The town boasts no buildings of particular interest, and the frequency of earthquakes prevents such plans.

Over night the Orinoco had swollen and its faster current took us in ten hours the 13 leagues from the mouth of the Mataveni to the higher Maypures cataract, reminding us where we had camped coming up river. From the mouth of the Atabapo to that of the Apure we enjoyed travelling through a country in which we had long lived. We were just as squashed in the canoe and were stung by the same mosquitoes, but the certainty that in a few weeks our suffering would end kept our spirits up.

We landed in the middle of the Strait of Baraguan to measure the river's breadth. In this excessively hot place we looked in vain for plants in the clefts of rocks. The stones were covered with thousands of iguanas and geckos with spreading, membranous fingers. The thermometer placed against the rock rose to 50.2°C. The ground appeared to undulate in the mirages, without a breath of wind in the air. How vivid is the calm of nature at midday in these burning zones. The wild animals retire to the thickets; birds hide under leaves. Yet in this silence, if you listen carefully, you hear slight sounds, a dull vibration, a hum of insects. Nothing makes you sense the extent and power of organic life more keenly than this.

On the 23rd of July we entered the town of Nueva Barcelona, less affected by the heat on the llanos than by the sand wind that painfully chapped our skin. We were well received at the house of Don Pedro Lavié, a wealthy French merchant. He had been accused of hiding the unfortunate Espaìa (133) on the run in 1796. He was arrested by order of the audiencia. But his friendship with the Cumanà governor, and his services as a merchant, got him released. We had visited him in prison before and now found him back with his family, but very ill. He died without seeing the independence of America that his friend Don José Espaìa had predicted just before his execution.