San Fernando is infamous for its suffocating heat throughout most of the year. This western part of the llanos is the hottest because the air from all the arid steppes reaches here. During the rainy season the heat of the llanos increases considerably, especially in July when the sky is covered with cloud. The thermometer reached 39. in the shade.

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 result of my labors have long since been published. My map of the Magdalena river appeared in 1816. Till then no traveler had ever described New Granada, and the public, except in Spain, knew how to navigate the Magdalena only from some lines traced by Bouguer. (142) Travel books have multiplied, and political events have drawn travelers to countries with free institutions who publish their journals too hurriedly on returning to Europe. They have described the towns they visited and stayed in, as well as the beautiful landscape; they give information about the people, the means of travel in boat, on mule or on men's backs. Though these works have familiarized the Old World with Spanish America, the absence of a proper knowledge of Spanish and the little care taken to establish the names of rivers, places and tribes have led to extraordinary mistakes. (143)

The Indians enter the caves once a year near midsummer with poles to destroy most of the nests. Several thousand birds are killed; the older ones hover over their heads to defend their young, screaming horribly. The young, called los pollos del guàcharo, fall to the ground and are cut open on the spot. Their peritoneum is loaded with fat; a layer of fat reaches from the abdomen to the anus, forming a kind of wad between the bird's legs. During this period, called the cosecha de la manteca (oil harvest) in Caripe, the Indians build palm-leaf huts near the entrance and in the cave vestibule itself. We could see their remains. With a brushwood fire they melt the fat of the young birds just killed and pour it into clay pots. This fat is known as butter or guàcharo oil; it is semi-liquid, clear and odorless, and so pure that it lasts for a year without going rancid. In the Caripe convent kitchen they only use fat from this cave, and the food never had a disagreeable taste or smell thanks to this fat.

Despite the heat the traveler feels under his feet on the brink of the crater, the cone of ashes remains covered with snow for several months. The cold, angry wind, which had been blowing since dawn, forced us to seek shelter at the foot of the Piton. Our hands and feet were frozen, while our boots were burned by the ground we walked on. In a few minutes we reached the foot of the Sugar Loaf, which we had so laboriously climbed; our speed of descent was in part involuntary as we slipped down on the ashes. We reluctantly abandoned that solitary place where nature had magnificently displayed herself before us. We deluded ourselves that we might again visit the Islands, but this, like many other plans, has never been carried out.

At midday we stopped at a deserted spot called Algodonal. I left my companions while they beached the boat and prepared the meal. I walked along the beach to observe a group of crocodiles asleep in the sun, their tails, covered with broad scaly plates, resting on each other. Small herons, as white as snow, walked on their hacks, even on their heads, as if they were tree trunks. The crocodiles were grey- green, their bodies were half covered in dried mud. From their color and immobility they looked like bronze statues. However, my stroll almost cost me my life. I had been constantly looking towards the river, and then, on seeing a flash of mica in the sand, I also spotted fresh jaguar tracks, easily recognizable by their shape. The animal had gone off into the jungle, and as I looked in that direction I saw it lying down under the thick foliage of a ceiba, eighty steps away from me. Never has a tiger seemed so enormous.

On leaving Spain I had promised to join his expedition wherever I could reach it. Bonpland, as active and optimistic as usual, and I immediately decided to split our herbals into three lots to avoid the risk of losing what had taken so much trouble to collect on the banks of the Orinoco, Atabapo and Río Negro. We sent one collection by way of England to Germany, another via Càdiz to France, and the third we left in Havana. We had reason to congratulate ourselves on this prudence. Each collection contained virtually the same species; if the cases were taken by pirates there were instructions to send them to Sir Joseph Banks or to the natural history museum in Paris. Luckily I did not send my manuscripts to Càdiz with our friend and fellow traveler Father Juan Gonzalez, who left Cuba soon after us but whose vessel sank off Africa, with the loss of all life. We lost duplicates of our herbal collection, and all the insects Bonpland had gathered. For over two years we did not receive one letter from Europe; and those we got in the following three years never mentioned earlier letters. You may easily guess how nervous I was about sending a journal with my astronomical observations and barometrical measurements when I had not had the patience to make a copy. After visiting New Granada, Peru and Mexico I happened to be reading a scientific journal in the public library in Philadelphia and saw: 'M. de Humboldt's manuscripts have arrived at his brother's house in Paris via Spain. I could scarcely suppress an exclamation of joy.