The hypothesis that during the Cumana earthquakes elastic fluids escape from the earth's surface seems confirmed by the dreadful noise heard during the shocks near the wells in the plain of Charas. Water and sand are sometimes thrown 20 feet high. Similar phenomena did not escape the ancients' notice in areas of Greece and Asia Minor, in caves, crevices and underground rivers. Nature, in its uniform progress, everywhere gives birth to the same ideas concerning the causes of earthquakes, and man, forgetting the measure of its force, tries to diminish the effect of underground explosions. What the great Roman naturalist Pliny said about how wells and caves are the cause is repeated by the most ignorant Indians of Quito when they show travelers the guaicos, or crevices, of Pichincha.

Founded in 1555, under the government of Villacinda, by Alonso Díaz Moreno, Nueva Valencia is twelve years older than Caracas Some justifiably regret that Valencia has not become the capital of the country. Its situation on the plain, next to a lake, recalls Mexico City. If you consider the easy communications offered by the Aragua valleys with the plains and rivers entering the Orinoco; if you accept the possibility of opening up navigation into the interior through the Pao and Portuguesa rivers as far as the Orinoco mouth, the Casiquiare and the Amazon, you realize that the capital of the vast Venezuelan provinces would have been better placed next to the superb Puerto Cabello, under a pure, serene sky, and not next to the barely sheltered bay of La Guaira, in a temperate but always misty valley.

The areas around the lake are unhealthy only in the dry season when the water-level falls and the mud bed is exposed to the sun's heat. The bank, shaded by woods of Coccoloba barbadensis and decorated with beautiful lilies, reminds one, because of the similar aquatic plants found there, of the marshy banks of our European lakes. Here we find pondweed (potamogeton), chara and cat's-tails 3 feet high, hardly different from the Typha augustifolia of our marshes. Only after very careful examination do we recognize each plant to be a distinct species, peculiar to the New World. How many plants from the Strait of Magellan to the cordilleras of Quito have once been confused with northern temperate ones owing to their analogy in form and appearance!

We left the Esmeralda mission on the 23rd of May. We were not exactly ill, but emaciated and weak thanks to the torment of mosquitoes, the bad food and the long journey on that narrow and damp pirogue. We did not go further up the Orinoco than the mouth of the Guapo; had we wanted to reach the Orinoco sources we would have gone beyond this point, but private travelers are not authorized to leave pacified areas. From the Guapo river to the Guaharibo cataract there are only 15 leagues. But the cataract is crossed by a liana bridge where Indians armed with bows and arrows stop whites from entering their lands. Up to the present time the Orinoco posed two distinct problems for geographers: its sources, and the nature of its communications with the Amazon. This latter was the aim of our journey.