The Chaimas have extreme difficulty in coping with numerical relationships. I did not meet one who could tell me whether he was eighteen or sixty years old. The Chaima language has words to express high numbers, but few Indians know how to use them. As they need to count the more intelligent ones count in Spanish up to thirty or forty, and even that seems a great mental strain. In their own language they cannot count up to six. Since European savants have dedicated themselves to the study of the structure of American languages we cannot attribute the imperfection of a language to what appears to be the stupidity of a people. We recognize that everywhere languages offer greater richnesses and more nuances than can be supposed from the lack of culture of the people speaking them.

There we met the district corregidor, Don Alejandro Mejía, an amiable and well-educated man. He gave us three Indians who would cut us a path through the jungle with machetes. In this country, where people rarely travel, the vegetation is so fertile that a man on horseback can barely make his way along the jungle paths tangled with liana and branches during the rainy season. To our great annoyance the Catuaro missionary insisted on leading us to Cariaco, and we could not decline his offer. He told us a dreadful story. The independence movement, which had nearly broken out in 1798, had been preceded and followed by trouble among the slaves at Cariaco. An unfortunate negro had been condemned to death and our host was going to Cariaco to give him some spiritual comfort. How tedious this journey became. We could not escape talking about 'the necessity of slavery, the innate wickedness of the blacks, and how slavery benefited Christians'!

The missionary from the Raudales looked after the preparations for our journey rather too well. He worried that there might not be enough Maco and Guahibo Indians on hand who knew the labyrinth of small canals and rapids that form the raudales and cataracts, so at night he put two Indians in the cepo, that is, they were tied to the ground and fastened together between two pieces of wood with a padlock. In the morning we were awoken by the shouts of a young Indian who was being brutally beaten with a whip of manatee skin. His name was Zerepe, an extremely intelligent Indian who later served us well, but at the time refused to travel with us. He had been born in the Atures mission; his father was from the Maco tribe and his mother from the Maypure; he had run off to the jungle (al monte) and lived with wild Indians for years. He had learned several languages, and the missionary used him as an interpreter. Not without difficulty did we obtain his pardon. 'Without severity, we were told, 'you would get nothing'.

Days passed quickly in the Capuchin convent in the Caripe mountains, despite our simple but monotonous life. From sunrise to sunset we toured the forests and mountains near by looking for plants, and have never collected so many. When the heavy rain stopped us travelling far we visited Indian huts and the communal conuco, or attended the nightly meetings when the alcaldes handed out the work for the following day. We did not return to the convent until bells called us for meals in the refectory with the monks. At dawn we sometimes accompanied them to the church to attend doctrina, that is, religious classes for Indians. It was hard explaining dogma to people who hardly knew Spanish. The monks are almost completely ignorant of the Chaima Indian language, and the resemblance of sounds between the languages muddles the poor Indians so that strange ideas arise. One day we witnessed a missionary struggling to explain to his class that invierno, winter, and infierno, hell, were not the same thing, but as different as hot and cold. The Chaima Indians know winter only as the rainy season, and imagine that 'the white's hell' is a place where the evil are exposed to horrific rainstorms. The missionary lost his temper, but it was useless; the first impression caused by the almost identical words persisted; in the Indians' minds the images of rain and hell could not be separated.

The external edges of La Caldera are almost perpendicular, rather like the Somma seen from the Atrio del Cavallo. We got to the bottom of the crater following a trail of broken lava from the eastern breach of the wall. We only felt the heat above the crevices, which exhaled watery vapors with a strange buzzing sound. Some of these crevices can be found on the outside of the crater, on the external parapet that surrounds it. A thermometer placed inside one of them rose suddenly from 68°C to 75°C. This would have risen higher, but we had to pull the thermometer out to prevent our hands from being burned It might be thought that these vapors, which escape in puffs of air, contain muriatic or sulphuric acids, but when condensed they had no particular taste. Experiments showed that these chimneys exhale pure water only.

By the morning of the 21st of June we were on our way to the volcano's summit. The day was not fine and the peak's summit, generally visible from Orotava from sunrise to ten at night, was covered in cloud. What links an excursion to the peak with similar ones to Chamonix or Etna is that one is obliged to follow guides, and sees only what has already been seen and described by previous travelers.

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.