We left Caracas on the 7th of February, on a fresh afternoon, ready to begin our journey to the Orinoco. The memory of this period is today more painful than it was years ago. In those remote countries our friends have lost their lives in the bloody revolutions that gave them freedom and then alternatively deprived them of it. (76) The house where we lived is now a heap of rubble. Terrible earthquakes have transformed the shape of the ground; the city I described has disappeared. On the same spot, on the fissured ground, another city is slowly being built. The ruins, tombs for a large population, have already turned into shelter for human beings.