We left Imposible on the 5th of September before dawn. The descent is very dangerous for the pack-animals; the path is only some 15 inches wide, with precipices on either side. In 1796 a useful plan to build a road from the village of San Fernando to the mountain was conceived. A third of this route had already been finished, but unfortunately it ran only from the plain to the foot of Imposible. Work was halted for one of those reasons that makes all attempts at improvement in the Spanish colonies fail. Several authorities wanted to assume the rights of running the works. The people patiently paid their tolls for a route that did not exist until the Cumanà governor put an end to this abuse. As we descended we noticed that alpine limestone reappeared under the sandstone. As the strata generally incline to the south and south-east many springs well up along the southern side of the mountain. In the rainy season these springs become torrents that rush down under the hura, the cuspa and the silver-leafed cecropia, or trumpet trees.

Lake Valencia is full of islands, which embellish the countryside with the picturesque form of their rocks and by the kind of vegetation that covers them. Tropical lakes have this advantage over alpine ones. The islands, without counting Morro and Cabrera, which are already joined to the mainland, are fifteen in number. They are partially cultivated, and very fertile due to the vapors rising from the lake. Burro, the largest island, some 2 miles long, is inhabited by mestizo families who rear goats. These simple people rarely visit the Mocundo coast. The lake seems gigantic to them: they produce bananas, cassava, milk and fish. A hut built of reeds, some hammocks woven with cotton grown in neighboring fields, a large stone on which they build their fires, and the ligneous fruit of the tutuma to draw water with are their sole household needs. The old mestizo who offered us goat's milk had a lovely daughter. We learned from our guide that isolation had made him as suspicious as if he lived in a city. The night before our arrival some hunters had visited the island. Night surprised them and they preferred to sleep out in the open rather than return to Mocundo. This news spread alarm around the island. The father forced his young daughter to climb a very tall zamang or mimosa, which grows on the plain at some distance from the hut. He slept at the foot of this tree, and didn't let his daughter down until the hunters had left.

Our first excursion to the Araya peninsula was followed by another more important and instructive one to the mountain missions of the Chaima Indians. Such a variety of objects attracted our attention. We found ourselves in a country bristling with forests on our way to visit a convent shaded by palm trees and arborescent ferns in a narrow valley which was deliciously fresh, despite being in the middle of the torrid zone. In the surrounding mountains there are eaves inhabited by thousands of nocturnal birds; and, what struck our imagination more than all the marvels of the physical world, even further up we found a people until recently still nomadic, hardly free from a natural, wild state, but not barbarians, made stupid more from ignorance than from long years of being brutalized. What we knew about history increased our interest in these people. The promontory of Paria was what Columbus first saw of this continent; these valleys ended there, devastated first by the warlike, cannibalistic Caribs, then by the mercantile and orderly European nations. If the Spaniards visited these shores it was only to get, either by violence or exchange, slaves, pearls, gold and dye-woods; they tried to dignify their motives for such an insatiable greed with the pretence of religious zeal.

There is no missionary at Esmeralda: the monk appointed to celebrate mass here lives in Santa Barbara, some 50 leagues away. To come upstream takes him four days and he only appears five or six times a year. An old soldier welcomed us in a friendly way; he took us for Catalan shopkeepers come to trade with the missions. When he saw our wads of paper for drying plants he laughed at our naive ignorance: 'You have come to a land where nobody is going to buy such a thing. Here few write. We use dried maize, banana and vijaho (heliconia) leaves, as you do paper in Europe, to wrap up small objects like needles, hooks and other things you have to look after carefully. This old soldier was both the civil and spiritual authority. He taught children, if not the catechism, then at least how to say the rosary, and he tolled the bells as a hobby. Sometimes he used the sacristan's stick in ways that did not amuse the Indians.

In this plantation, as in all the provinces of Venezuela, you can distinguish, from afar, three kinds of sugar cane by the color of their leaves; the old Creole cane, Otaheite cane and Batavia cane. The first has a darker green leaf, a thinner stalk with knots close together. It was the first sugar cane introduced from India to Sicily, the Canaries and the West Indies. The second is lighter green; its stalk is fatter, more succulent. The whole plant seems more luxuriant. It arrived thanks to the voyages of Bougainville, Cook and Bligh. Bougainville brought it to Mauritius, where it went to Cayenne, Martinique and from 1792 to the rest of the West Indies. Otaheite sugar cane, the to of the islanders, is one of the most important agricultural acquisitions due to the voyages of naturalists. On the same plot of land it gives a third of vezou (juice) more than Creole cane, but due to the thickness of its stalk and strength of its ligneous fibers furnishes much more fuel. This is an advantage in the West Indian Islands where the destruction of the forests has forced planters to use the bagasse as fuel for their furnaces. The third species, the violet sugar cane, is called Batavia or Guinea cane, and certainly comes from Java. Its leaves are purple and large and it is preferred in Caracas for making rum. (79) At Tuy they were busy finishing a ditch to bring irrigation water. This enterprise had cost the owner 7, piastres to build and 4, piastres in lawsuits with his neighbors. While the lawyers argued over the canal, which was only half finished, de Manterola had already begun to doubt the worth of his project. I took the level of the ground with a lunette d'épreuve placed on an artificial horizon and found that the dam had been placed 8 feet too low. What sums of money have not been uselessly spent in the Spanish colonies founding constructions on poor levelling!

On the evening of the 25th of June we left Santa Cruz and set our course for South America. A strong north-westerly was blowing and tight, sharp waves were caused by strong currents. We soon lost sight of the Canary Islands above whose high peaks a reddish mist appeared; only the Pico de Teide reappeared briefly from time to time as the wind dispersed the clouds surrounding the peak. For the first time we realized how deeply we are stirred by the sight of land situated on the limits of the torrid zone, where nature appears so opulent, grandiose and marvelous. We had stayed at Tenerife for a few days only, yet we left the island feeling we had lived there for a long time.