We passed some huts inhabited by mestizos. Each hut stands in the center of an enclosure containing banana trees, papaw trees, sugar cane and maize. The small extent of cultivated land might surprise us until we recall that an acre planted with bananas produces nearly twenty times as much food as the same space sown with cereals. In Europe our wheat, barley and rye cover vast spaces of land; in general arable lands border each other wherever inhabitants live on wheat. It is different in the torrid zone where man obtains food from plants that yield more abundant harvests more quickly. In these favored climates the immense fertility of the soil corresponds to the heat and humidity. A large population can be fed from a small plot of land covered with banana, cassava, yams and maize. The isolation of huts dispersed in the forest indicates to the traveler how fertile nature is.

Our boat was waiting for us in the Puerto de Arriba above the Atures cataract. On the narrow path that led to the embarcadero we were shown the distant rocks near the Ataruipe caves. We did not have time to visit that Indian cemetery though Father Zea had not stopped talking about the skeletons painted red with onoto inside the great jars. 'You will hardly believe, said the missionary, 'that these skeletons and painted vases, which we thought unknown to the rest of the world, have brought me trouble. You know the misery I endure in the Raudales. Devoured by mosquitoes, and lacking in bananas and cassava, yet people in Caracas envy me! I was denounced by a white man for hiding treasure that had been abandoned in the caves when the Jesuits had to leave. I was ordered to appear in Caracas in person and journeyed pointlessly over 150 leagues to declare that the cave contained only human bones and dried bats. However, commissioners were appointed to come up here and investigate. We shall wait a long time for these commissioners. The cloud of mosquitoes (nube de moscas) in the Raudales is a good defence.

April 29th. The air was cooler, and without zancudos, but the clouds blocked out all the stars. I begin to miss the Lower Orinoco as the strong current slowed our progress. We stopped for most of the day, looking for plants. It was night when we reached the San Baltasar mission or, as the monks call it, la divina pastora de Baltasar de Atabapo. We lodged with a Catalan missionary, a lively and friendly man who, in the middle of the jungle, displayed the activities of his people. He had planted a wonderful orchard where European figs grew with persea, and lemon trees with mamey. The village was built with a regularity typical of Protestant Germany or America. Here we saw for the first time that white and spongy substance which I have made known as dapicho and zapis. We saw that this stuff was similar to elastic resin. But through sign language the Indians made us think that it came from under ground so we first thought that maybe it was a fossil rubber. A Poimisano Indian was sitting by a fire in the missionary hut transforming dapicho into black rubber. He had stuck several bits on to thin sticks and was roasting it by the fire like meat. As it melts and becomes elastic the dapicho blackens. The Indian then beat the black mass with a club made of Brazil-wood and then kneaded the dapicho into small balls some 3 to 4 inches thick, and let them cool. The balls appear identical to rubber though the surface remains slightly sticky. At San Baltasar they are not used for the game of pelota that Indians play in Uruana and Encaramada but are cut up and used as more effective corks than those made from cork itself. In front of the Casa de los Solteros - the house where men lived - the missionary showed us a drum made from a hollow cylinder of wood. This drum was beaten with great lumps of dapicho serving as drumsticks. The drum has openings that could be blocked by hand to vary the sounds, and was hanging on two light supports. Wild Indians love noisy music. Drums and botutos, the baked-earth before trumpets, are indispensable instruments when Indians decide to play music and make a show.

The city, dominated by the fort, lies at the foot of a hill without greenery. Not one bell-tower nor one dome attract the traveler from afar; just a few tamarind trees and coconut and date palms stand out above the flat-roofed houses. The surrounding plains, especially near the sea, appear sad, dusty and arid, while fresh, luxuriant vegetation marks out the winding river that divides the city from its outskirts and the European settlers from the copper-colored Indians. The isolated, bare and white San Antonio mountain, with its fort, reflects a great mass of light and heat: it is made of breccia, whose strata contain fossil marine life. Far away towards the south you can make out a dark curtain of mountains. They are the high calcareous New Andalusian alps, topped with sandstone and other recent geological formations. Majestic forests cover this inland mountain chain linked along a forested valley with the salty, clayey and bare ground around Cumana. In the gulf and on its shores you can see flocks of fishing herons and gannets, awkward, heavy birds, which, like swans, sail along the water with their wings raised. Nearer the inhabited areas, you can count thousands of gallinazo vultures, veritable flying jackals, ceaselessly picking at carcasses. A gulf whose depths contain hot thermal springs divides the secondary from the primary and schistose rocks of the Araya peninsula. The two coasts are bathed by a calm blue sea lightly rippled by a constant breeze. A dry, pure sky, only lightly clouded at sunset, lies above the sea, over a peninsula devoid of trees and above the Cumana plains, while one sees storms building up and bursting into fertile downpours around the inland mountain peaks.

This hope was not totally justified. The youngest passenger attacked by the malignant fever was unluckily the only victim. He was a nineteen-year-old Asturian, the only son of a widow without means. Several circumstances made the death of this sensitive and mild-tempered youth moving. He had embarked against his will; his mother, whom he hoped to help through his work, had sacrificed her tenderness and own interests in order to assure the fortune of her son in the colonies, helping a rich cousin in Cuba. The luckless youth had fallen from the start into a total lethargy, with moments of delirium, and died on the third day. Yellow fever, or black vomit as it is called at Veracruz, does not carry off the sick so frighteningly quickly. Another Asturian, even younger than he, never left his bedside and, more remarkably, never caught the illness. He was following his compatriot to Cuba, to be introduced into his relation's house, on whom they had based all their hopes. It was desperate to see this young man abandon himself to deep grief and curse the advice of those who had sent him to a distant land, alone and without support.

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.