We found our way out by following the rivulet. Before daylight dazzled our eyes we saw the river water outside the grotto sparkle among the foliage. It looked like a painting, with the cave opening as a frame. Once outside we rested by the stream. We could hardly believe that this cave had remained unknown in Europe. The guàcharos should have made it far more famous. The missionaries had ordered a meal to be prepared at the entrance. Banana and vijao (Heliconia bihai) leaves served as a tablecloth, following the custom of the country. (58)

A historical narrative covers two quite different aims: whatever happens to the traveler; and the observations he makes during his journey. Unity of composition, which distinguishes good work from bad, can be sought only when the traveler describes what he has seen with his own eyes, and when he has concentrated on the different customs of people, and the great phenomena of nature, rather than on scientific observations. The most accurate picture of customs is one that deals with man's relationships with other men What characterizes savage and civilized life is captured either through the difficulties encountered by a traveler or by the sensations he feels. It is the man himself we wish to see in contact with the objects around him. His narration interests us far more if a local coloring informs the descriptions of the country and its people. This is what excites us in the narrations of the early navigators who were driven more by guts than by scientific curiosity and struggled against the elements as they sought a new world in unknown seas.

At the Divina Pastora hospice the path turns to the north-east along a stretch without trees, formerly leveled by the waters. There we found not only cacti, tufts of cistus-leaved tribulus and the beautiful purple euphorbia, cultivated in Havana gardens under the odd name of Dictamno real, but also the avicennia, the allionia, the sesuvium, the thalinum and most of the portulaceous plants that grow on the banks of the Gulf of Cariaco. This geographical distribution of plants appears to designate the limits of the ancient coast and to prove that the hills along the southern side, which we were following, once formed islands separated from the continent by an arm of the sea.

Orotava, the ancient Taoro of the Guanches, lies on an abrupt slope of a hill. The streets seemed deserted; the houses solidly built but melancholic; they nearly all belong to a nobility accused of being too proud, presumptuously calling itself the Twelve Houses. We passed along a high aqueduct lined with luxuriant fern, and visited many gardens where northern European fruit trees grow along with orange, pomegranate and date trees. Even though we knew about Franqui's dragon tree (16) from previous travelers, its enormous thickness amazed us. We were told that this tree, mentioned in several ancient documents, served as a boundary mark and already in the fifteenth century was as enormous as it is today. We calculated its height to be about 50 to 60 feet; its circumference a little above its roots measured 45 feet. The trunk is divided into many branches, which rise up in the form of a chandelier and end in tufts of leaves similar to the Mexican yucca.

The result of my labors have long since been published. My map of the Magdalena river appeared in 1816. Till then no traveler had ever described New Granada, and the public, except in Spain, knew how to navigate the Magdalena only from some lines traced by Bouguer. (142) Travel books have multiplied, and political events have drawn travelers to countries with free institutions who publish their journals too hurriedly on returning to Europe. They have described the towns they visited and stayed in, as well as the beautiful landscape; they give information about the people, the means of travel in boat, on mule or on men's backs. Though these works have familiarized the Old World with Spanish America, the absence of a proper knowledge of Spanish and the little care taken to establish the names of rivers, places and tribes have led to extraordinary mistakes. (143)

The earthquake of the 4th of November, the first I had experienced, made a great impression on me, heightened, perhaps accidentally, by remarkable meteorological variations. It was also a movement that went up and down, not in waves. I would never have thought then that, after a long stay in Quito and on the Peruvian coast, I would get as used to these often violent ground movements as in Europe we get used to thunder. In Quito we never considered getting out of bed when at night there were underground rumblings (bramidos), which seemed to announce a shock from the Pichincha volcano. The casualness of the inhabitants, who know that their city has not been destroyed in three centuries, easily communicates itself to the most frightened traveler. It is not so much a fear of danger as of the novelty of the sensation that strikes one so vividly when an earthquake is felt for the first time.

In 1797 the San Fernando missionary had led his men to the banks of the Guaviare river on one of those hostile incursions banned both by religion and Spanish law. They found a Guahiba mother with three children in a hut, two of whom were not yet adults. They were busy preparing cassava flour. Resistance was impossible; their father had gone out fishing, so the mother tried to run off with children. She had just reached the savannah when the Indians, who hunt people the way whites hunt blacks in Africa, caught her. The mother and children were tied up and brought back to the river bank. The monks were waiting for this expedition to end, without suffering any of the dangers. Had the mother resisted the Indians would have killed her; anything is allowed in this hunting of souls (conquista espiritual), and it is especially children that are captured and treated as poitos or slaves in the Christian missions. They brought the prisoners to San Fernando, hoping that the mother would not find her way back by land to her home. Separated from those children who had gone fishing with their father the day she was kidnapped, this poor woman began to show signs of the deepest despair. She wanted to bring those children in the power of the missionaries back home, and several times ran off with them from the San Fernando village but the Indians hunted her down each time. After severely punishing her the missionary took the cruel decision of separating the mother from her two infants. She was led alone to a mission on the Río Negro, up the Atabapo river. Loosely tied up, she sat ill the bow of the boat. She had not been told where she was going; but she guessed by the sun's position that she was being taken away from her house and native land. She managed to break her bonds and jumped into the water and swam to the river bank. The current pushed her to a bank of rock, which is named after her today. She climbed up and walked into the jungle. But the head of the mission ordered his Indians to follow and capture her. She was again caught by the evening. She was stretched out on the rock (the Piedra de la Madre) where she was beaten with manatee whips. Her hands tied up behind her back with the strong cords of the mavacure, she was then dragged to the Javita mission and thrown into one of the inns called casas del rey. It was the rainy season and the night was very dark. Impenetrable forests separate the Javita and San Fernando missions some 25 leagues apart in a straight line. The only known route was by river. Nobody ever tried to go by land from one mission to another, even if only a few leagues away. But this did not prevent a mother separated from her children. Her children were at San Fernando so she had to find them, rescue them from Christians, and bring them back to their father on the Guaviare. The Guahiba woman was not closely supervised in the inn. As her hands were bloodied the Javita Indians had loosened her bindings. With her teeth she managed to break the cords, and she disappeared into the night. On the fourth day she was seen prowling round the hut where her children were being kept at the San Fernando mission. This woman had just carried out, added the monk telling us this sad story, 'something that the toughest Indian would not have even considered. She had crossed the jungle in a season when the sky is continuously covered with cloud, when the sun appears. only for a few minutes for days on end. Had she followed the flow of water? But flooding had forced her to walk far from the river, in the middle of jungles where the river is imperceptible. How many times must she have been blocked by thorny liana growing round trees! How many times must she have swum across streams! What on earth could this luckless woman have eaten during her four days' walk? She said that she had eaten only those large black ants called vachacos that climb up trees and hang resinous nests from branches. We pressed the missionary to tell us whether the Guahiba woman had finally enjoyed peace and happiness with her family. He did not want to satisfy our curiosity. But on our return from the Río Negro we learned that this Indian woman was not even left to recover from her wounds before she was again separated from her children, and sent to a mission on the Upper Orinoco. She died by refusing to eat food, as do all Indians when faced with great calamities. (112)