The night of the 11th was cool and exceptionally beautiful. A little before dawn, at about half past two in the morning, extraordinarily luminous meteors were seen. Bonpland, who had got up to get some fresh air in the gallery, was the first to notice them. Thousands of fire-balls and shooting stars fell continually over four hours from north to south. According to Bonpland, from the start of this phenomenon there was not a patch of sky the size of three quarters of the moon that was not packed with fire-balls and shooting stars. The meteors trailed behind them long luminous traces whose phosphorescence lasted some eight seconds.

The town of Cumana, capital of New Andalusia, lies a mile from the landing-stage or the boca battery where we stepped ashore after crossing the bar of the Manzanares river. We had to traverse a vast plain (el salado) between the Guaiqueri dwellings and the coast. The reverberation from the parched land increased the intense heat. The thermometer, plunged into the white sand, reached 37.7'C. The first plant we gathered from American soil was the Avicennia tomentosa (Mangle prieto), which scarcely reaches 2 feet high here. This shrub, with the sesuvium, the yellow gomphrena and the cacti, covered a ground saturated with soda salts; they belong to the scant social plants like European heaths, and in the torrid zone thrive only on the seashore and high in the Andean plateaux.

On my arrival at Terra Firma I was struck by the correlation between two natural phenomena: the destruction of Cumanà on the 14th of December 1797 and volcanic eruptions in the smaller West Indian Islands. Something similar happened at Caracas on the 26th of March 1812. In 1797 the volcano on Guadeloupe Island, on the Cumanà coast, seemed to have reacted; fifteen years later another volcano on San Vincente also reacted, and its effects were felt as far as Caracas and the banks of the Apure. Probably both times the center of the eruption was at an enormous depth in the earth, equidistant from the points on the earth's surface that felt the movement. The shock felt at Caracas in December 1811 was the only one that preceded the terrible catastrophe of the 26th of March 1812. In Caracas, and for 90 leagues around, not one drop of rain had fallen for five months up to the destruction of the capital. The 26th of March was a very hot day; there was no wind and no cloud. It was Ascension Day and most people had congregated in the churches. Nothing suggested the horrors to come. At seven minutes past four the first shock was felt. 'It was so violent that the church bells rang, and lasted five to six seconds. It was followed immediately by another lasting ten to twelve seconds when the ground seemed to ripple like boiling water. People thought the quake was over when an infernal din came from under the ground. It was like thunder but louder and longer than any tropical storm. Following this there was a vertical movement lasting three seconds followed by undulations. The shocks coming from these contrary movements tore the city apart. Thousands of people were trapped in the churches and houses. (78)

Our host had visited the New World with an expedition that was set up to fell wood for the Spanish navy on the Paria Gulf shore. In the vast jungle of mahogany, cedar and Brazil-wood that borders the Caribbean Sea they wanted to select the largest trees, shape them in a rough way for the building of ships, and send them every year to the dockyard at Càdiz. White, unacclimatized men could not support the hard work, the heat, or the effect of the noxious air from the jungle. The same winds that are loaded with the perfume of flowers, leaves and wood also bring, so to speak, the germs of disease into our organs. Destructive fevers carried off not only the ship carpenter but also those who managed the business; so this bay, which the early Spaniards called Golfo Triste on account of the gloomy and wild aspect of its coasts, became the graveyard of European seamen.

The farmers and their slaves cut a path through the jungle to the first Juagua river waterfall, and on the 10th of September we made our excursion to the Cuchivano crevice. Entering the cave we saw a disemboweled porcupine and smelled the stink of excrement, similar to that of European cats, and knew that a jaguar had been near by. For safety the Indians returned to the farm to fetch small dogs. It is said that when you meet a jaguar in your path he will leap on to a dog before a man. We did not follow the bank of the torrent, but a rocky wall overhanging the water. We walked on a very narrow ledge along the side of a precipice with a drop of some 200 to 300 feet. When it narrowed, so that we could not walk along it any further, we climbed down to the torrent and crossed it on foot, or on the backs of slaves, to climb up the other side. Climbing is very tiring, and you cannot trust the lianas, which, like thick rope, hang from tree-tops. Creepers and parasites hang loosely from the branches they grip; their stalks together weigh a lot, and if you slip and grab one of the lianas you risk bringing down a tangle of green branches. The vegetation became impenetrable the more we advanced. In some places the roots of trees grew in the existing cracks between strata and had burst the calcareous rock. We could hardly carry the plants we picked at each step. The canna, the heliconia with pretty purple flowers, the costus and other plants from the Amomum genus reach here the height of 8 to 50 feet. Their tender, fresh green leaves, their silky sheen and the extraordinary development of their juicy pulp contrast with the brown of the arborescent ferns whose leaves are so delicately jagged. The Indians made deep incisions in the tree trunks with their long knives to draw our attention to the beauty of the red-and gold-colored woods, which one day will be sought after by our furniture makers. They showed us a plant with composite flowers that reaches some 20 feet high (Eupatorium laevigatum), the so-called 'Rose of Belveria' (Brownea racemosa), famous for the brilliance of its purple flowers, and the local 'dragon's blood', a species of euphorbia not yet catalogued, whose red and astringent sap is used to strengthen the gums. They distinguished species by their smell and by chewing their woody fibers. Two Indians, given the same wood to chew, pronounced, often without hesitation, the same name. But we could not take advantage of our guides' wisdom, for how could they reach leaves, flowers and fruit (53) growing on branches some 50 to 60 feet above the ground? We were struck in this gorge by the fact that the bark of the trees, even the ground, were covered in moss and lichen.

The vagabonds of the plains had as little interest in working as the Indians, who were obliged to live 'under the sound of the church bell'. The former used their pride to justify their indolence. In the missions every colored person who is not completely black like an African, or copper-colored like an Indian, calls himself a Spaniard; belongs to the gente de razon, that is, gifted with reason, and this reason', which is both arrogant and lazy, tells the whites and those who think themselves white that agriculture is work for slaves, poitos and newly converted Indians. As these American colonists were separated from their homelands by jungles and savannahs they soon dispersed, some going north to Caura and Caroni, and others south to the Portuguese possessions. Thus, the fame of the emerald mines of Duida died out, and Esmeralda became a cursed place of banishment for monks where the dreadful cloud of mosquitoes darkens the atmosphere all year round. When the father superior of the mission wants to upbraid his monks he threatens to send them to Esmeralda: 'That is, say the monks, 'to be condemned to mosquitoes, to be devoured by zancudos gritones (shouting flies), which God seems to have created to punish man.

Missionaries have managed to rid the Indians of certain customs concerning birth, entering puberty and burying the dead; they have managed to stop them painting their skin or making incisions in their chins, noses and cheeks; they have banished the superstitious ideas that in many families are passed down mysteriously from father to son; but it was far easier to suppress practices and memories than it was to replace the old ideas with new ones. In the missions the Indian has a far more secure life than he had before. He is no longer a victim of the continuous struggle between man and the elements, and he leads a more monotonous and passive life than the wild Indian, but he is also less likely to animate his own spiritual development. His thinking has not increased with his contact with whites; he has remained estranged from the objects with which European civilization has enriched the Americas. All his acts seem dictated exclusively by wants of the moment. He is taciturn, without joy, introverted and, on the outside, serious and mysterious. Someone who has been but a short time in a mission could mistake his laziness and passivity for a meditative frame of mind.