On the 21st of February, at nightfall, we left the pretty Hacienda de Cura and set off for Guacara and Nueva Valencia. As the heat of the day was stifling we traveled by night. We crossed the village of Punta Zamuro at the foot of Las Viruelas mountain. The road is lined with large zamangs, or mimosa trees, reaching some 60 feet high. Their almost horizontal branches meet at more than 150 feet distance. I have never seen a canopy of leaves so thick and beautiful as these. The night was dark: the Rincòn del Diablo and its dentated rocks appeared every now and then, illuminated by the brilliance of the burning savannahs, or wrapped in clouds of reddish smoke. In the thickest part of the brush our horses panicked when they heard the howl of an animal that seemed to be following us. It was an enormous jaguar that had been roaming these mountains for three years. It had escaped from the most daring hunters. It attacked horses and mules, even when they were penned in, but not lacking food had not yet attacked human beings. Our negro guide screamed wildly to scare off the beast, which he obviously did not achieve.

We left Imposible on the 5th of September before dawn. The descent is very dangerous for the pack-animals; the path is only some 15 inches wide, with precipices on either side. In 1796 a useful plan to build a road from the village of San Fernando to the mountain was conceived. A third of this route had already been finished, but unfortunately it ran only from the plain to the foot of Imposible. Work was halted for one of those reasons that makes all attempts at improvement in the Spanish colonies fail. Several authorities wanted to assume the rights of running the works. The people patiently paid their tolls for a route that did not exist until the Cumanà governor put an end to this abuse. As we descended we noticed that alpine limestone reappeared under the sandstone. As the strata generally incline to the south and south-east many springs well up along the southern side of the mountain. In the rainy season these springs become torrents that rush down under the hura, the cuspa and the silver-leafed cecropia, or trumpet trees.

It took us three days to reach the Cari Carib missions. The ground was not as cracked by the drought as in the Calabozo plains. A few showers had revived the vegetation. We saw a few fan palms (Corypha tectorum), rhopalas (Chaparro) and malpighias with leathery, shiny leaves growing far apart from each other. From far off you recognize where there might be water from groups of mauritia palms. It was the season in which they are loaded with enormous clusters of red fruit looking like fir-cones. Our monkeys loved this fruit, which tasted like overripe apples. The monkeys were carried with our baggage on the backs of mules and did all they could to reach the clusters hanging over their heads. The plains seemed to ripple from the mirages. When, after travelling for an hour, we reached those palms standing like masts on the horizon, we were amazed to realize how many things are linked to the existence of one single plant. The wind, losing its force as it strikes leaves and branches, piles sand round the trunks. The smell of fruit and the bright green of the leaves attract passing birds that like to sway on the arrow-like branches of the palms. All around you hear a murmur of sound. Oppressed by the heat, and used to the bleak silence of the llanos, you think you feel cooler just by hearing the sound of branches swaying. Insects and worms, so rare in the llanos, thrive here so that even one stunted tree, which no traveler would have noticed in the Orinoco jungles, spreads life around it in the desert.

April 12th. We left Carichana at about two in the afternoon and found our way obstructed with granite blocks that break the river current. We passed close to the great reef called Piedra del Tigre. The river is so deep that sounding with a line of 22 fathoms did not touch the bottom. Towards the evening the sky covered over and squalls of wind announced a coming storm. It began to pour so hard with rain that our leafy roof hardly protected us. Luckily the rain scared off the mosquitoes that had been tormenting us all day. We were opposite the Cariven cataract, and the current was so strong that we had great difficulty in reaching land. Time and time again we were pushed back to the middle of the river until two Salivas, excellent swimmers, threw themselves into the water and swam ashore, pulling the boat in until it could be tied to a rock where we spent the night. Thunder rolled all night; the river swelled under our eyes, and we often worried that the furious waves would sink our fragile boat.

April 10th. We were unable to set sail until ten in the morning. It was hard to adapt to the new pirogue, which we saw as a new prison. To make it wider at the back of the boat we made branches into a kind of trellis, which stuck out on both sides. Unfortunately the leaf roof of this lattice-work was so low that you either had to lie down, and consequently saw nothing, or you had to stay hunched over. The need to transport pirogues across rapids, and even from one river to another, and the fear of giving too much hold to the wind by raising the toldo made this construction necessary for the little boats going up the Río Negro. The roof was designed for four people stretched Out on the deck or lattice-work, but your legs stuck far out, and when it rained half your body got wet. Worse still, you lie on oxhides or tiger skins, and the branches under the skins hurt you when you lie down. The front of the boat was filled with the Indian rowers, armed with 3-foot-long paddles in the form of spoons. They are all naked, sitting in twos, and row beautifully together. Their songs are sad and monotonous. The little cages with our birds and monkeys, increasing as we went on, were tied to the toldo and the prow. It was our travelling zoo. Despite losses due to accidents and sunstroke, we counted fourteen little animals when we came back from the Casiquiare. Every night when we established camp, our zoo and instruments occupied the middle; around them we hung our hammocks, then the Indians' hammocks and, outside, the fires we thought indispensable to scare off jaguars. At sunrise our caged monkeys answered the cries of the jungle monkeys.

After two hours' navigation we reached the mouth of the Tomo and the small mission of Davipe, founded in 1755 by an army lieutenant, and not by monks. Father Morillo, the missionary on the spot, with whom we stayed a few hours, received us with great hospitality, and even offered us some Madeira wine. As far as luxury foods go we would have preferred wheat bread; the absence of bread is felt far more over a long time than any alcoholic drink. Every now and then the Portuguese bring small quantities of Madeira wine to the Río Negro. But the word madera in Spanish means 'wood', so some monks, poorly versed in geography, were reluctant to celebrate mass with Madeira wine; they took it for a fermented liquor from some local tree, like palm-tree wine, and asked the superior of their order to decide if the vino de Madera was in fact a wine made from grapes or the sweet juice from a tree (de algún palo). Already, from the beginning of the conquest, the question of whether priests could celebrate mass with another fermented liquor similar to wine had been raised. The question, predictably, was decided negatively.

April 16th. Towards evening we heard that our boats had passed both rapids in less than six hours, and arrived in good condition at the Puerto de Arriba. 'Your boat will not be wrecked because you are not carrying goods, and you travel with the monk of the Raudales, a little brown man said to us bitterly. By his accent we recognized him as a Catalan. He traded in tortoise oil with the mission Indians, and was not a friend of the missionaries. 'The frail boats belong to us Catalans who, with permission from the Guianan Government, but not from the president of the mission, try to trade above the Atures and Maypures. Our boats are wrecked in the Raudales, key to all the missions beyond, and then Indians take us back to Carichana and try to force us to stop trading. What is the source of this deep hatred of the missions in the Spanish colonies? It cannot be because they are rich in the Upper Orinoco. They have no houses, no goats and few cows. The resentment is aimed at the ways the missionaries obstinately close their territories off to white men.