A journey to the Tenerife volcano's summit is not solely interesting for the amount of phenomena available for scientific research but far more for the picturesque beauties offered to those who keenly feel the splendors of nature. It is a hard task to describe these sensations for they work on us so much more powerfully the more they are vague. When a traveler must describe the highest peaks, the river cataracts, the tortuous Andes valleys, he risks tiring his readers with the monotonous expression of his admiration. It seems better suited to my intentions in this narrative of my journey to evoke the particular character of each zone. We get to know the features of each region better the more we indicate its varying characteristics by comparing it with others. This method enables us to discover the sources of the pleasures conferred by the great picture of nature.

We had been warned that we would find the insects at Esmeralda even more cruel and voracious' than in this branch of the Orinoco; despite this we looked forward to sleeping in an inhabited place, and botanizing a little at last. At our last camp on the Casiquiare we had quite a fright. I presume to describe something that might not greatly interest a reader, but should be part of a journal of incidents on a river in such wild country. We slept on the edge of the jungle. At midnight the Indians warned us that they had heard a jaguar growl very close to us; it seemed to be up a nearby tree. The jungle is so thick here that only animals who climb trees exist. As our fires gave off 'plenty of light, and as we had become hardened to fear, we did not worry too much about the jaguar's cries. The smell and barking of one of our dogs had attracted the jaguar. This dog, a large mastiff, had barked at the Start, but when the jaguar approached the dog howled and hid under our hammocks. Since the Apure we had been used to this alternating bravery and fear in a young, tame and affectionate dog. We had a terrible shock the next morning. When getting ready to leave, the Indians told us that our dog had disappeared'. There was no doubt that the jaguar had killed it. Perhaps when it no longer heard the roars it had wandered off along the shore, or perhaps we slept so deeply we never heard the dog's yelps. We were often told that on the Orinoco and the Magdalena old jaguars were so clever that they hunted their prey in the very camps, and twisted their victims' necks so that they could not shout. We waited a long while in case the dog was merely lost. Three days later we returned to the same place and again heard a jaguar roar. So the dog, which had been our companion from Caracas, and had often swum away from crocodiles, had ended up being devoured in the jungle.

In the New Andalusia and Barcelona provinces, under the name of the Gobierno de Cumanà, there are more than fourteen tribes: in New Andalusia reside the Chaimas, the Guaiquerí, the Pariagotos, the Quaquas, the Araucans, the Caribs and the Guaraunos; in the province of New Barcelona, the Cumanagotos, the Palenques, the Caribs, the Piritus, the Tomuzas, the Topocuares, the Chacopotes and the Guarives. Nine to ten of these tribes consider themselves to be of entirely different races. Of the remaining tribes, the most numerous are the Chaimas in the Caripe mountains, the Caribs in the southern savannahs of New Barcelona, and the Cumanagotos in the Piritu missions. Some Guarauno families live on the left shore of the Orinoco where the delta begins, under missionary discipline. The most common languages are those of the Guaraunos, the Caribs, the Cumanagotos and the Chaimas.

Further to the south-west the soil turns dry and sandy. We climbed a relatively high range that separates the coast from the great plains or savannahs bordering the Orinoco. That section of the mountains through which the road to Cumanacoa leads is devoid of vegetation and falls steeply both to the south and north. It has been called Imposible because this impenetrable mountain ridge would offer a refuge to the inhabitants of Cumanà during a hostile invasion. We reached the top just before sunset. I scarcely had the time to take a few horary angles with my chronometer to calculate the geographic longitude of the place.

Nothing can compare to the majestic tranquillity of the stars in the sky in this solitary place. At nightfall, when we stared at the point where the horizon meets the meadows on this gently rolling plain, it seemed, as later in the Orinoco steppes, as if we were seeing the surface of an ocean supporting the starry vault. The tree at whose feet we sat, the luminous insects dancing in the air, the shining constellations of the Southern hemisphere, everything reminded us that we were far from our homeland. And if, in the middle of this exotic nature, the sound of cow bells or the bellowing of a bull came from the small valleys, memories of our native land were suddenly awoken. It was as if we heard distant voices echoing across the ocean, magically carrying us from one hemisphere to another. How strangely mobile is man's imagination, eternal source of his joys and pains!