As I have already written, the marshy plains between Javita and the Pimichín landing-stage are infamous for the quantity of poisonous snakes inhabiting them. Before we installed ourselves in the hut some Indians killed two mapanares snakes, about 5 feet long. It is a beautiful animal, with a white belly and red and black spots on its back, and very poisonous. As we could not hang our hammocks, and as there was lots of grass inside the hut, we were nervous about sleeping on the floor In the morning as we lifted up a jaguar skin that one of our servants had slept on, another large snake appeared. Indians say these reptiles move slowly while not being chased, and approach man seeking his heat. I do not want to defend snakes, but I can assure you that if these poisonous animals were as aggressive as some think, in some places in America, like the Orinoco and the damp mountains of Choco, man would long ago have died out faced with the infinite number of snakes.

I placed very active curare on the crural nerves of a frog without noticing any change, measuring the degree of its organs' irritability with an arc formed of heterogeneous metals. But these Galvanic experiments hardly worked on birds a few minutes after they had been shot with poison arrows. Curare works only when the poison acts on the vascular system. At Maypures, a colored man (a zambo, a cross between Indian and negro) was preparing one of those poison arrows that are shot in blowpipes, to kill small monkeys or birds for M. Bonpland. He was a carpenter of extraordinary strength. He stupidly rubbed the curare between slightly bleeding fingers and fell to the ground, dizzy for half an hour. Luckily it was a weak curare (destemplado), used for small animals, which may be revived later by placing muriate of soda in the wound. During our journey back from Esmeralda to Atures. I escaped from danger myself. The curare had attracted humidity and become liquid and spilled from a poorly closed jar on to our clothes. We forgot to check the inside of a sock filled with curare when washing our clothes. Just touching this sticky stuff with my hand I realized I should not pull on the poison sock. The danger was all the greater as my toes were bleeding from chigoe wounds.

There is no missionary at Esmeralda: the monk appointed to celebrate mass here lives in Santa Barbara, some 50 leagues away. To come upstream takes him four days and he only appears five or six times a year. An old soldier welcomed us in a friendly way; he took us for Catalan shopkeepers come to trade with the missions. When he saw our wads of paper for drying plants he laughed at our naive ignorance: 'You have come to a land where nobody is going to buy such a thing. Here few write. We use dried maize, banana and vijaho (heliconia) leaves, as you do paper in Europe, to wrap up small objects like needles, hooks and other things you have to look after carefully. This old soldier was both the civil and spiritual authority. He taught children, if not the catechism, then at least how to say the rosary, and he tolled the bells as a hobby. Sometimes he used the sacristan's stick in ways that did not amuse the Indians.

May 11th. We went on shore. A few steps from the beach Bonpland discovered an almendròn, a majestic Bertholletia excelsa. The Indians assured us that this tree on the Casiquiare banks was unknown at San Francisco Solano, Vasiva and Esmeralda. They did not think that this 60-foot-high tree could have been accidentally planted by some traveler. Experiments made at San Carlos have shown how rare it is to make a bertholletia germinate because of its ligneous pericarp, and the oil in the nut, which turns the seed rancid. Perhaps this was part of a forest of inland bertholletia. (116)

After dividing all that belongs to astronomy, botany, zoology, the political description of New Spain, and the history of the ancient civilizations of certain New World nations into separate works, many general results and local descriptions remained left over, which I could still collect into separate treatises. I had prepared several during my journey; on races in South America; on the Orinoco missions; on what hinders civilization in the torrid zone, from the climate to the vegetation; the landscape of the Andes compared to the Swiss Alps; analogies between the rocks of the two continents; the air in the equinoctial regions, etc. I had left Europe with the firm decision not to write what is usually called the historical narrative of a journey, but just to publish the results of my researches. I had arranged the facts not as they presented themselves individually but in their relationships to each other. Surrounded by such powerful nature, and all the things seen every day, the traveler feels no inclination to record in a journal all the ordinary details of life that happen to him.

After two days near the Atures cataract we were happy to load the canoe again and leave a place where the temperature was usually 29°C by day and 26°C at night. All day we were horribly tormented by mosquitoes and jejenes, tiny venomous flies (or simuliums), and all night by zancudos, another kind of mosquito feared even by the Indians. Our hands began to swell, and this swelling increased until we reached the banks of the Temi. The means found to escape these insects are often quite original. The kind missionary Father Zea, all his life tormented by mosquitoes, had built a small room near his church, up on a scaffolding of palm trunks, where you could breathe more freely. At night we climbed up a ladder to dry our plants and write our diary. The missionary had correctly observed that the insects preferred the lower levels, that is, from the ground up to some 15 feet. At Maypures the Indians leave their villages at night and sleep near the cataracts because the mosquitoes seem to avoid air loaded with vapors.

Four days had passed and our boat still had not reached the Pimichín river landing-stage. 'There is nothing you lack in my mission, Father Cerezo said to us. 'There are bananas and fish; at night mosquitoes do not bite; and the longer you stay the more likely it is that you will be able to observe stars. If your boat is wrecked during the portage we will get you another one and I will enjoy living a few more weeks con gente blanca y de razòn (with white and rational people). Despite our impatience, we listened with interest to this missionary's stories confirming all that we had been told about the spiritual state of the Indians in that region. They live in isolated clans of forty to fifty people under a chief. They recognize a common cacique only in times of war with neighbors. Between these clan. mutual mistrust is great, as even those who live near each other speak different languages. Such is the labyrinth of these rivers that families settled themselves without knowing what tribe lived nearest to them. In Spanish Guiana a mountain or a jungle just half a league wide separates clans who would need two days navigating along rivers to meet. In the impenetrable jungle of the torrid zone rivers increase the dismemberment of great nations, favor the transition of dialects into separate languages, and nourish distrust and national hatred. Men avoid each other because they do not understand each other, and hate because they fear.