The San Fernando missionary, with whom we stayed two days, lived in a village that appears slightly more prosperous than others we had stayed in on our journey, yet still had only 226 inhabitants. (109) We found some traces of agriculture; every Indian has his own cacao plantation, which gives a good crop by the fifth year but stops fruiting earlier than in the Aragua valleys. Around San Fernando there are some savannahs with good pasture but only some seven or eight cows remain from a vast herd left behind by the frontier expedition. The Indians are a little more civilized than in the other missions. Surprisingly, we came across an Indian blacksmith.

Further to the south-west the soil turns dry and sandy. We climbed a relatively high range that separates the coast from the great plains or savannahs bordering the Orinoco. That section of the mountains through which the road to Cumanacoa leads is devoid of vegetation and falls steeply both to the south and north. It has been called Imposible because this impenetrable mountain ridge would offer a refuge to the inhabitants of Cumanà during a hostile invasion. We reached the top just before sunset. I scarcely had the time to take a few horary angles with my chronometer to calculate the geographic longitude of the place.

The town of Cumana, capital of New Andalusia, lies a mile from the landing-stage or the boca battery where we stepped ashore after crossing the bar of the Manzanares river. We had to traverse a vast plain (el salado) between the Guaiqueri dwellings and the coast. The reverberation from the parched land increased the intense heat. The thermometer, plunged into the white sand, reached 37.7'C. The first plant we gathered from American soil was the Avicennia tomentosa (Mangle prieto), which scarcely reaches 2 feet high here. This shrub, with the sesuvium, the yellow gomphrena and the cacti, covered a ground saturated with soda salts; they belong to the scant social plants like European heaths, and in the torrid zone thrive only on the seashore and high in the Andean plateaux.

The moment of leaving Europe for the first time is impressive. We vainly recall the frequency of communications between the two worlds; wevainly reflect how, thanks to the improved state of navigation, we may nowcross the Atlantic, which compared to the Pacific is but a shortish arm ofthe sea; yet what we feel whenwe begin our first long-distance voyage is none the less accompanied by adeep emotion, unlike any we may have felt in our youth. Separated from theobjects of our dearest affections, and entering into a new life, we areforced to fall back on ourselves, and we feel more isolated than we have ever felt before.

The hate that Indians show for nearly all human beings who speak another language, and are considered to be barbarians of an inferior race, often erupts in the missions after years of slumber. A few months before our arrival at Esmeralda, an Indian born in the jungle behind the Duida was travelling with another who previously, having been captured by the Spaniards on the banks of the Ventuario, had lived peacefully in the village or, as they say, 'under the sound of a bell' (debajo de la campana). This latter Indian had to walk slowly because of a fever he had caught in the mission, usually due to a sudden change in diet. Annoyed by this delay his companion killed him and hid the corpse under some thickets near Esmeralda. The crime, like so many others committed among the Indians, would not have been discovered if the murderer had not proposed to celebrate a feast the following day. He tried to persuade his sons, who were born in the mission and were Christians, to accompany him to the jungle and fetch bits of the corpse to eat. The boys had difficulty in stopping him. The family squabble alerted a soldier who found out what the Indians had tried to conceal.

We passed some huts inhabited by mestizos. Each hut stands in the center of an enclosure containing banana trees, papaw trees, sugar cane and maize. The small extent of cultivated land might surprise us until we recall that an acre planted with bananas produces nearly twenty times as much food as the same space sown with cereals. In Europe our wheat, barley and rye cover vast spaces of land; in general arable lands border each other wherever inhabitants live on wheat. It is different in the torrid zone where man obtains food from plants that yield more abundant harvests more quickly. In these favored climates the immense fertility of the soil corresponds to the heat and humidity. A large population can be fed from a small plot of land covered with banana, cassava, yams and maize. The isolation of huts dispersed in the forest indicates to the traveler how fertile nature is.