We spent the night on Isla Conserva. The Indians had lit a camp-fire near the water. Again we confirmed that the glow of the flames attracted crocodiles and dolphins (toninas) whose noise stopped us sleeping until we decided to put the fire out. That night we had to get up twice. I mention this as an example of what it means to live in the jungle. A female jaguar approached our camp-site when it brought a cub to drink water. The Indians chased it away, but we heard its cub's cries, like a cat's, for hours. A little later our large dog was bitten, or stung as the Indians say, by some enormous bats (94) that flew around our hammocks. The wound in its snout was tiny and the dog howled more from fear than pain.

The Pimichín landing-stage is surrounded by a small cacao plantation. The trees are very robust and loaded with fruit all year round. When you think that the cacao tree is native to the Parima jungle, south of latitude 6, and that the humid climate of the Upper Orinoco suits this precious tree far more than the Caracas and New Barcelona air, which each year gets drier, then one regrets that this beautiful part of the world is in monks' hands as they discourage agriculture. We spent the night in a recently abandoned hut. An Indian family had left behind fishing tackle, earthen jars, mats woven with palm-tree petioles: all the household goods of these carefree people who are indifferent to property Large amounts of mani (a mixture of the resins moronobea and Amyris caraìa) lay in piles around the hut. This is used by Indians to pitch their canoes and to fix the bony ray spines on to their arrows. We found several jars filled with a vegetable milk, which is used as a varnish, called in the missions leche para pintar (milk for painting). They coat their furniture with this viscous juice. It leaves it a fine white; it thickens in contact with air to appear glossy. The more we study vegetable chemistry in the torrid zone the more we shall discover in remote spots still accessible to European trade, and already half prepared by the plants themselves, products that we believed belonged to the animal kingdom. These discoveries will be multiplied when, as the political state of the world now seems to show, European civilization flows towards the equinoctial regions of the New World.

We entered into the cave following the rivulet, some 28 to 30 feet wide. We walked along the banks as far as the calcareous incrustations allowed us; frequently, when the current slipped between high clusters of stalactites, we were forced to walk along the river bed, only 2 feet deep. To our surprise we learned that this underground stream is the source to the Caripe river and becomes navigable for canoes a few leagues from here, after joining the Santa Maria river. Along the underground rivulet banks we found a quantity of palm-tree wood, remains of trunks used by Indians to climb to the cave's ceiling when searching for nests. The rings formed from the traces of the leaf stems are used as a perpendicular ladder.

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.

As far as the rock of Gayta, that is, up to the beginning of the great retama plain, the Tenerife peak is covered in beautiful vegetation, with no traces of recent devastations. But hardly have you entered the plain littered with pumice-stone than the countryside changes dramatically; at every step you trip over enormous obsidian blocks thrown down by the volcano. Everything here betrays a deep solitude. A few goats and rabbits are the only signs of life in this high plain. From up here the island becomes an immense heap of burned matter surrounded by a narrow fringe of vegetation.

We had yet to climb the steepest part of the mountain, the Piton, which forms the summit. The slope of this small cone, covered with volcanic ashes and fragments of pumice-stone, is so steep that it would have been impossible to reach the top had we not been able to follow an old lava current that seemed to have flowed down from the crater and whose remains have defied the ravages of time. The debris forms a wall of scoria, which reaches into the loose ash. We climbed to the Piton by clinging to this sharp-edged scoria, which, worn down by the weather, often broke off in our hands. It took us half an hour to reach the top, though it was only some 90 toises above us.

Days passed quickly in the Capuchin convent in the Caripe mountains, despite our simple but monotonous life. From sunrise to sunset we toured the forests and mountains near by looking for plants, and have never collected so many. When the heavy rain stopped us travelling far we visited Indian huts and the communal conuco, or attended the nightly meetings when the alcaldes handed out the work for the following day. We did not return to the convent until bells called us for meals in the refectory with the monks. At dawn we sometimes accompanied them to the church to attend doctrina, that is, religious classes for Indians. It was hard explaining dogma to people who hardly knew Spanish. The monks are almost completely ignorant of the Chaima Indian language, and the resemblance of sounds between the languages muddles the poor Indians so that strange ideas arise. One day we witnessed a missionary struggling to explain to his class that invierno, winter, and infierno, hell, were not the same thing, but as different as hot and cold. The Chaima Indians know winter only as the rainy season, and imagine that 'the white's hell' is a place where the evil are exposed to horrific rainstorms. The missionary lost his temper, but it was useless; the first impression caused by the almost identical words persisted; in the Indians' minds the images of rain and hell could not be separated.