Leaving the tableland of Guardia we descended to the Indian village of Santa Cruz. First we reached a steep, extremely slippery slope that the missionaries strangely named Bajada del Purgatorio, or Descent of Purgatory. It consists of eroded slaty sandstone, covered with clay; the slope seems terribly steep. To go down, the mules draw their hind legs to their forelegs, lower their rumps and trust their luck sliding downhill. The rider has nothing to fear as long as he drops the reins and leaves the mule alone. From here to the left we saw the great pyramid of Guàcharo. This calcareous peak looks very picturesque, but we soon lost it to view when we entered the thick jungle known as Montana de Santa María. We spent seven hours crossing it. It is hard to imagine a worse path; a veritable ladder, a kind of gorge where, during the rainy season, torrent water rushes down the rocks step by step. The steps are from 2 to 3 feet high. The hapless animals first have to calculate how to pass their loads between the tree trunks, and then jump from one block to another. Scared of slipping they wait a few moments, as if studying the terrain, and then draw their four legs together like wild goats do. If the mule misses the nearest rock it sinks deep into the soft ochre clay that fills in the gaps between the rocks. When there are no rocks, the rider's feet and the mule's legs are supported by a tangle of enormous tree roots. The creoles have faith in the skill and instinct of their mules and remain in the saddle during the long dangerous descent. We preferred to dismount because we feared fatigue less than they do, and were more prepared to travel slowly as we never stopped collecting plants and examining the rocks.

Maritime expeditions and voyages round the world have rightly conferred fame on naturalists and astronomers appointed by their governments, but while these distinguished men have given precise notions of the coasts of countries, of the natural history of the ocean and islands, their expeditions have advanced neither geology nor general physics as travels into the interior of a continent should have. Interest in the natural sciences has trailed behind geography and nautical astronomy. During long sea-voyages, a traveler hardly ever sees land; and when land is seen after a long wait it is often stripped of its most beautiful products. Sometimes, beyond a sterile coast, a ridge of high mountains covered in forests is glimpsed, but its distance only frustrates the traveler.

MEsmeralda is the most famous place on the Orinoco for the making of the active poison that is used in war, out hunting and, surprisingly, as a remedy against gastric illnesses. The poison of the Amazonian Tikuna, the upas-tieute of Java and the Guianan curare are the most poisonous substances known. Already by the sixteenth century Raleigh had heard the word urari spoken, signifying a vegetable substance used to poison arrows. However, nothing was known for sure in Europe about this poison.

May 10th. Overnight our canoe was loaded and we set off a little before dawn to go up the Río Negro to the mouth of the Casiquiare and begin our researches on the true course of this river linking the Orinoco and Amazon. The morning was beautiful, but as the heat rose the sky began to cloud over. The air is so saturated with water in these forests that water bubbles become visible at the slightest increase of evaporation on the earth's surface. As there is no breeze the humid strata are not replaced and renewed by drier air. This clouded sky made us gloomier and gloomier. Through this humidity Bonpland -lost the plants he had collected; for my part I feared finding the same Río Negro mists in the Casiquiare valley. For more than half a century nobody in the missions has doubted the existence of communications between the two great river systems: the important aim of our journey was reduced to fixing the course of the Casiquiare by astronomic means, especially at its point of entry into the Río Negro, and its bifurcation with the Orinoco. Without sun or stars this aim would have been frustrated, and we would have been uselessly exposed to long, weary deprivation. Our travelling companions wanted to return by the shortest journey, along the Pimichín and its small rivers; but Bonpland preferred, like myself, to persist in the original plan we had traced out while crossing the Great Cataracts. We had already traveled by canoe from San Fernando de Apure to San Carlos along the Apure, Orinoco, Atabapo, Temi, Tuamini and Río Negro for over 180 leagues. In entering the Orinoco by the Casiquiare we still had some 320 leagues to cover from San Carlos to Angostura. It would have been a shame to let ourselves be discouraged by the fear of a cloudy sky and the Casiquiare mosquitoes. Our Indian pilot, who had recently visited Mandavaca, promised us sun and 'those great stars that eat up clouds' once we had left the black waters of the Guaviare. So we managed to carry out our first plan and returned to San Fernando along the Casiquiare. Luckily for our researches the Indian's prediction was fulfilled. The white waters brought us a clear sky, stars, mosquitoes and crocodiles.

The Pimichín landing-stage is surrounded by a small cacao plantation. The trees are very robust and loaded with fruit all year round. When you think that the cacao tree is native to the Parima jungle, south of latitude 6, and that the humid climate of the Upper Orinoco suits this precious tree far more than the Caracas and New Barcelona air, which each year gets drier, then one regrets that this beautiful part of the world is in monks' hands as they discourage agriculture. We spent the night in a recently abandoned hut. An Indian family had left behind fishing tackle, earthen jars, mats woven with palm-tree petioles: all the household goods of these carefree people who are indifferent to property Large amounts of mani (a mixture of the resins moronobea and Amyris caraìa) lay in piles around the hut. This is used by Indians to pitch their canoes and to fix the bony ray spines on to their arrows. We found several jars filled with a vegetable milk, which is used as a varnish, called in the missions leche para pintar (milk for painting). They coat their furniture with this viscous juice. It leaves it a fine white; it thickens in contact with air to appear glossy. The more we study vegetable chemistry in the torrid zone the more we shall discover in remote spots still accessible to European trade, and already half prepared by the plants themselves, products that we believed belonged to the animal kingdom. These discoveries will be multiplied when, as the political state of the world now seems to show, European civilization flows towards the equinoctial regions of the New World.

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)