After four hours walking through savannah we reached a little wood composed of shrubs called el pejual, perhaps because of the amount of pejoa (Gaultheria odorata) there, a plant with strong-smelling leaves. The mountain slope became more gentle and we could pleasurably study the plants of the region. Perhaps nowhere else can so many beautiful and useful plants be discovered in such a small space. At 1, toises high the raised plains of La Silla gave place to a zone of shrubs that reminded one of the pàramos and punas.

The bones are prepared in three different ways; they are whitened, or colored red with annatto, a dye from Bixa orellana, or varnished with a scented resin and wrapped like mummies in banana leaves. Indians insisted that as soon as somebody died the corpse was left for months in damp earth so that the flesh rotted away; then it was dug up and the remains of the flesh scraped off with a sharp stone. Some tribes in Guiana still practice this method. Next to the baskets or mapires we also found half-baked clay urns with the remains of whole families. The largest urns are almost 3 feet high and 5. feet wide. They are greenish, and of a pleasing oval shape. Some have crocodiles and snakes drawn on them. The top edges are decorated with meanders and labyrinths. These are very similar to the decorations covering the walls of the Mexican palace at Mitla; they are found everywhere, even among the Greeks and Romans, as on the shields of the Tahitians and other Pacific Islanders.

I will not go into further details about the physiological properties of these New World poisons that kill so quickly without ever making you sick if taken in the stomach, and without warning you of death by violently exciting the marrow in your spine. On the Orinoco river banks you cannot eat chicken that has not been killed by a poison arrow. Missionaries claim that animal flesh is only worth eating if killed in this way. Though ill with tertiary fever Father Zea insisted every morning that a poison arrow and the live chicken due to be eaten by us be brought to his hammock. He did not want anybody else to kill the bird, despite his weakness. Large birds like the guan (pava de monte) or the curassow (alector), pricked in their thighs, die in two to five minutes, but it takes ten to twelve minutes for a pig or peccary to die. Bonpland found that the same poison bought in different villages revealed enormous differences.

Beyond the Great Cataracts an unknown land begins. This partly mountainous and partly flat land receives tributaries from both the Amazon and the Orinoco. No missionary writing about the Orinoco before me has passed beyond the Maypures raudal. Up river, along the Orinoco for a stretch of over 100 leagues, we came across only three Christian settlements with some six to eight whites of European origin there. Not surprisingly, such a deserted territory has become the classic place for legends and fantastic histories. Up here serious missionaries have located tribes whose people have one eye in the middle of their foreheads, the heads of dogs, and mouths below their stomachs. It would be wrong to attribute these exaggerated fictions to the inventions of simple missionaries because they usually come by them from Indian legends. From his vocation, a missionary does not tend towards skepticism; he imprints on his memory all that the Indians have repeated and when back in Europe delights in astonishing people by reciting facts he has collected. These travelers' and monks' tales (cuentos de viajeros y frailes) increase in improbability the further you go from the Orinoco forests towards the coasts inhabited by whites. When at Cumanà you betray signs of incredulity, you are silenced by these words, 'The fathers have seen it, but far above the Great Cataracts màs arriba de los Raudales.

The farm we lodged at was a fine sugar-cane plantation. The ground is smooth like the bed of a dried lake. The Tuy river winds through land covered with banana trees and a little wood of Hura crepitans, Erythrina corallodrendon, and figs with nymphae leaves. The river is formed with quartz pebbles. I can think of no more pleasant bathe than that in the Tuy. The crystal-clear water remains at 18.6°C. This is cool for the climate; the sources of the river are in the surrounding mountains. The owner's house is situated on a hillock surrounded by huts for the negroes. Those who are married provide their own food. They are given, as everywhere in the Aragua valleys, a plot of land to cultivate, which they work on their Saturdays and Sundays, the free days of the week. They have chicken, and sometimes a pig. The owner boasts of their contentment in the same way that northern European landowners boast about the happy peasants on their land. The day we arrived three runaway negroes had been captured; newly bought slaves. I dreaded witnessing those punishments that ruin the charm of the countryside wherever there are slaves. Luckily, the blacks were treated humanely.

As I have already written, the marshy plains between Javita and the Pimichín landing-stage are infamous for the quantity of poisonous snakes inhabiting them. Before we installed ourselves in the hut some Indians killed two mapanares snakes, about 5 feet long. It is a beautiful animal, with a white belly and red and black spots on its back, and very poisonous. As we could not hang our hammocks, and as there was lots of grass inside the hut, we were nervous about sleeping on the floor In the morning as we lifted up a jaguar skin that one of our servants had slept on, another large snake appeared. Indians say these reptiles move slowly while not being chased, and approach man seeking his heat. I do not want to defend snakes, but I can assure you that if these poisonous animals were as aggressive as some think, in some places in America, like the Orinoco and the damp mountains of Choco, man would long ago have died out faced with the infinite number of snakes.