The missionary in San Fernando was an Aragonese Capuchin, well advanced in years but very strong and lively. His obesity, his good humor and his interest in battles and sieges contradicted the ideas held in northern countries concerning the melancholic reveries and contemplative life of missionaries. Though extremely busy organizing the slaughter of a cow for the following day he received us good-naturedly, and let us hang our hammocks in a gallery of his house. Sitting in his redwood armchair most of the day without doing anything, he complained of what he called the laziness and ignorance of his countrymen. He asked us thousands of questions about the real purpose of our journey, which to him seemed hazardous and quite useless. Here, as on the Orinoco, we grew weary of the lively curiosity manifested by Europeans in the middle of American jungles for the wars and political storms in the Old World.

You would think their mental stupidity greater than that of children when a white asks them questions about objects that have surrounded them since birth. Missionaries assured us that this is not due to timidity, and that among the missionary Indians in charge of public works this is not an innate stupidity but a block they have concerning the mechanisms of a language so different to their mother tongue. The Indians affirmed or denied whatever pleased the monks, and laziness, accompanied by that cunning courtesy common to all Indians, made them sometimes give the answers suggested by the questions. Travelers cannot be wary enough of this over-obliging approbation when they want to find out what Indians think. To test an Indian alcalde I asked him 'if he did not think that the Caripe river that comes from the Guacharo caves might not return there by some unknown entrance after climbing up the hill'. He looked as if he gave it serious thought for a while and answered in support of my theory: 'If it did not do this how else is there always water in the river?

Among the Saliva Indians we found a white woman, the Sister of a Jesuit from New Granada. After having lived with people who did not understand us, it is hard to describe the joy we felt on meeting somebody with whom we could converse without an interpreter. Each mission has at least two interpreters, lenguarazes. These Indians are rather less stupid than the others through whom the missionaries, who do not bother to learn the languages any more, communicate with neophytes. These interpreters accompanied us when we went out botanizing; they understood Spanish but spoke it badly. With their usual apathy they would arbitrarily answer any questions with a smiling 'yes father' or 'no father'. You will understand that after months of this kind of dialogue you lose patience without managing to get the information that you urgently require. It was not rare for us to use several interpreters, and sometimes we had to translate several times the same sentence in order to begin to understand the Indians. 'After leaving my mission, said the goodly monk at Uruana, 'you will be travelling as mutes. This prediction was exact. To get something even from the most primitive Indians we met, we turned to sign language. As soon as the Indian realizes you do not need him as an interpreter but are asking him something directly by pointing it out, he drops his usual apathy and shows a special skill in making himself understood. He varies his signs, pronounces his words slowly, and seems flattered by your interest.

The jungle between Javita and Caìo Pimichín holds a quantity of gigantic trees: ocoteas, laurels, curvana, jacio, iacifate, with a red wood like Brazil-wood, guamufate, the Amyris caraìa and the mani. All these trees top 100 feet. As their trunks throw out branches more than 100 feet high we had trouble getting flowers and leaves. Though the ground was strewn with foliage we could not rely on the Indians to tell us from which tree or liana they came. In the midst of such natural riches, our herborizations caused us more regret than satisfaction. What we managed to collect seemed without interest in comparison with what we might have collected. It rained without a break for several months and Bonpland lost the greater part of the specimens he had dried with artificial heat. Usually Indians name trees by chewing the bark. They distinguish leaves better than flowers or fruit. Busy in locating timber for canoes they are inattentive to flowers. 'None of those tall trees have flowers or fruit, they continually repeated. Like the botanists of antiquity, they denied what they had not bothered to observe. Tired by our questions they, in turn, made us impatient.

The banks of the Manzanares are very attractive, shaded by mimosas, erythrinas, ceibas and other gigantic trees. A river whose temperature descends during the floods to as low as 22'C when the air is 30'C to 35'C is a blessing in a country where the heat is excessive all year round and one wants to bathe several times a day. Children spend a good part of their lives in this water; everybody, including the richest women, knows how to swim. In a country where people live so close to nature the most important question people ask each other on first meeting is whether the river water is fresher than it was the day before. There are several ways of bathing. Each evening we visited a group of respectable people in the Guaiqueri suburb. In the moonlight they would install chairs by the water; men and women were lightly dressed as if at European spas, and would spend hours smoking cigars and chatting with their families and strangers, according to the habits of the place, about the dryness, the heavy rains and the excessive luxury of Caracas and Havana ladies. Nobody worried about the small but rare crocodiles that approach humans without attacking, although dolphins swim upstream and scare bathers by spouting water.

Those who have not traveled the great rivers of tropical America, like the Orinoco or the Magdalena, cannot imagine how all day long, ceaselessly, you are tormented by mosquitoes that float in the air, and how this crowd of little animals can make huge stretches of land uninhabitable. However used to the pain you may become, without complaining; however much you try to observe the object you are studying, the mosquitoes, jejenes and zancudos will tear you away as they cover your head and hands, pricking you with their needle-like suckers through your clothes, and climbing into your nose and mouth, making you cough and sneeze whenever you try to talk. In the Orinoco missions the plaga de las moscas, or plague of mosquitoes, is an inexhaustible subject of conversation. When two people meet in the morning the first questions they ask each other are, 'Que le han parecido los zancudos de anoche? and 'Como estamos hoy de mosquitos? ('How were the zancudos last night? and 'How are we for mosquitoes today?').