It was Carnival Tuesday, and everywhere people celebrated. The amusements, called carnes tollendas (or 'farewell to the flesh'), became at times rather wild: some paraded an ass loaded with water, and whenever they found an open window pumped water into the room; others carried bags full of hair from the pica pica (Dolichos pruriens), which greatly irritates skin on contact, and threw it into the faces of passers-by.

The cuspa, common enough around Cumanà and Bordones, is still an unknown tree to European botanists. For a long time it was used only for building houses. Since 1797, under the name of the cascarilla or bark tree (cinchona), it has become rather famous. Its trunk barely reaches 15 to 20 feet high. Its thin, pale yellow bark is an excellent febrifuge. It is even more bitter than the bark of the real cinchona, but less disagreeable. Cuspa is administered with great success in both alcoholic extracts and watery infusions for both intermittent and malignant fevers. (45)

On the 31st of May we passed the Guahibo and Garcita rapids. The islands in the middle of the river were covered in a brilliant green. The winter rains had unfolded the spathes of the vadgiai palms whose leaves pointed up to the sky. Just before sunset we landed on the eastern bank of the Orinoco, at the Puerto de Expedicion, in order to visit the Ataruipe cavern, apparently the burial-ground of a tribe that was destroyed.

I acquired some statistical notions on the spot by consulting the Uruana missionary and the traders. The three beaches furnish annually some 5, botijas, or jars of oil. Two hundred eggs yield enough oil to fill a bottle, and 5, eggs to fill the jar. If we estimate the number of eggs laid by each turtle as 116, and reckon that one third are destroyed, we can calculate that 330, arrau turtles must lay 33 million eggs on the three shores. But this calculation is far too low. For example, the number of eggs that hatch before the cosecha is so prodigious that near the Uruana camp I saw the whole beach swarming with little turtles escaping from the Indian children.

The morning was deliciously cool. The road, or rather path, that led to Cumanacoa follows the right bank of the Manzanares river, passing the Capuchin hospital situated in a small wood of lignum vitae and caper trees. After leaving Cumanà we reached the San Francisco hill during twilight and enjoyed an extensive view of the sea, the plain covered with golden-flowered bera (Palo sano, Zygophyllum arboreum), whose flowers smell of vanilla, and the Brigantín mountains.

The Chaimas hardly have any hair on their chins, like the Tongouses and other Mongolic races. They pluck out the few hairs that grow. In general it is erroneous to say that they cannot grow beards, because they pluck them out though even without that custom, they would be mostly smooth-faced.

'You cannot imagine, said the old Mandavaca missionary, 'how perverse this familia de indios (family of Indians) is. You accept individuals from another tribe into your mission; they seem tame, honest, good workers; you let them out on a foray (entrada) to capture wild Indians and you can scarcely stop them throttling all they can and hiding pieces of the corpses. We had with us in our pirogue an Indian who had escaped from the Guaisia river. In a few weeks he had become very civilized. At night he helped us prepare our astronomical instruments. He was as cheerful as he was intelligent, and we were ready to employ him. Imagine our disappointment when through an interpreter we heard him say that 'Marimonda monkey meat, although blacker, had the same taste as human meat. He assured us that 'his relations - that is, his tribal brothers -preferred to eat the palms of human hands, as well as those of bears'. As he spoke he gestured to emphasize his brutal greed. We asked this young, pacifistic man through our interpreter if he still felt a desire to 'eat a Cheruvichanena Indian' and he answered calmly that 'in the mission he would eat only what he saw los padres (the fathers) eating'. It is no point reproaching Indians about this abominable practice. In the eyes of a Guaisia Indian, a Cheruvichanena Indian is totally alien to him; to kill one was not morally very different from killing a jaguar. Eating what the fathers ate in the mission was simply convenience. If Indians escape to rejoin their tribes, or are driven by hunger, they quickly fall back into cannibalism.