April 4th. It was our last day on the Apure river. During several days a plague of insects had been torturing our hands and faces. They were not mosquitoes but zancudos, which are really gnats. They appear after sunset; their proboscises are so long that they can pierce your hammock, your canvas and your clothes from the other side.

People in Turbaco out botanizing with us often spoke of a marshy land in the middle of a palm-tree forest that they called 'little volcanoes', los volcancitos. A village tradition claims that this land had once been in flames but that a good priest, known for his piety, cast holy water and put the underground fire out, changing the volcano of fire into a volcano of water, volcàn de agua. This tale reminded me of the geological disputes between Neptunists and Vulcanists of the last century. The local wise man, the Turbaco priest, assured us that the volcancitos were simply thermal waters swimming with sulphur, erupting during storms with 'moans'. We had been too long in the Spanish colonies not to doubt these marvellous fantasies coming more from superstitious whites than from Indians, half-castes and African slaves. We were led to the volcancitos in the jungle by Indians and found salses, or air volcanoes.

The ground of the island rises to form an amphitheatre and, as in Peru and Mexico, contains in miniature all the possible climates, from African heat to alpine cold. (14) The mean temperatures of Santa Cruz, the port of Orotava, Orotava itself and La Laguna form a descending series. In southern Europe the change of seasons is too strongly felt to offer the same advantages. Tenerife on the other hand, on the threshold of the Tropics and a few days' journey from Spain, benefits from a good part of what nature has lavished in the Tropics. Its flora include the beautiful and imposing bananas and palms. He who is able to feel nature's beauty finds in this precious island a far more effective remedy than the climate. Nowhere else in the world seems more appropriate to dissipate melancholy and restore peace to troubled minds than Tenerife and Madeira. These effects are due not only to the magnificent situation and to the purity of air, but above all to the absence of slavery, which so deeply revolts us in all those places where Europeans have brought what they call their 'enlightenment and their 'commerce' to their colonies