As rain was pouring down we had to sleep in the overcrowded hut. The Indians slept only from eight at night to two in the morning; the rest of the time they chatted and prepared their bitter cupana drink, poking the fire and complaining of the cold, even though the temperature was 21°C. This custom of staying awake, even of getting up four or five hours before dawn, is common to the Guiana Indians.

Due to the thickness of the vegetation, made up of a plant of the Musaceae family, it was hard to find a path. We had to make one through that jungle of musaceous plants; the negroes led us, cutting a path with machetes. We saw the peak at intervals through breaks in the cloud, but soon we were covered in a thick mist and could only proceed using the compass; with each step we risked finding ourselves at the edge of a precipice, which fell 6, feet down to the sea. We had to stop, surrounded by cloud down to the ground, and we began to doubt if we would reach the eastern peak before sunset. Luckily the negroes carrying the water and the food had arrived, so we decided to eat something. But the meal did not last long because either the Capuchin father had not calculated our numbers properly or the slaves had already eaten everything. We found only olives and some bread. We had been walking for nine hours without stopping or finding water. Our guides seemed to lose heart, and wanted to go back. Bonpland and I had difficulty in persuading them to stay with us.

According to tradition, during the quake of 1766 the earth moved in simple horizontal waves; only on the fatal day of the 14th of December did the earth rise up. More than four fifths of the city was completely destroyed, and the shock, accompanied by a loud subterranean noise, resembled the explosion of a mine placed deep in the ground. Fortunately the main shocks were preceded by light undulations thanks to which most of the inhabitants were able to reach the streets, and only a few who hid in the church died. It is generally believed in Cumana that the worst earthquakes are preceded by weak oscillations in the ground, and by a humming that does not escape the notice of those used to this phenomenon. In those desperate moments you heard people everywhere shouting 'Misericordia! Tiembla! Tiembla! ('Mercy! The earth is trembling!') The most faint- hearted attentively observe the dogs, goats and pigs. These last, with their acute sense of smell, and skill in poking around in the earth, give warnings of approaching dangers with frightened screams.

We walked round the island with the missionary and a pulpero who boasted that he had been visiting the Indians' camp and the pesca de tortugas for over ten years. People come to this part of the Orinoco in the same way we visit fairs in Frankfurt or Beaucaire. We were on a plain of perfectly smooth sand. 'As far as the eye can see, they told us, 'a layer of sand covers the turtle eggs. The missionary had a long pole in his hand. He showed us that by sounding with this pole (vara) he could determine the depth of the stratum of eggs in the same way a miner discovers the limits of a bed of marl, bog iron or coal. By thrusting the pole perpendicularly into the sand he immediately feels, by the lack of resistance, that he has penetrated into the cavity hiding the eggs. We saw that the stratum is generally spread with such uniformity that the pole finds it everywhere in a radius of 10 toises around any given spot. People speak of 'square poles of eggs'; it is like a minefield divided into regularly exploited lots. The stratum of eggs is far from covering the whole island; it is no longer found where land rises abruptly because the turtles cannot climb to these plateaux. I reminded my guides that Father Gumilla's vivid descriptions assured us that the Orinoco beaches have less grains of sand than turtles, and that they were so numerous that if men and tigers did not annually kill thousands of them the turtles would stop boats sailing upstream. 'Son cuentos de frailes, the pulpero from Angostura whispered; for the only travelers in these lands are poor missionaries and what one calls monks' tales here are what in Europe would be called travelers' tales.

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.

Between Madeira and the African coast we were almost becalmed, which suited me perfectly as I could carry out my magnetic experiments. We nevertired of admiring the magnificent nights; nothing approaches the clarityand serenity of the African sky. We were struck by the extraordinary numberof shooting stars that crossed the night sky. The further south we advanced, the more we saw, especially nearthe Canary Islands. When we were about 40 leagues east of Madeira, a commonswallow (Hirundo rustica) landed on the topmast. It was so exhaustedwe easily caught it. What drives a bird so far off its course at such a calm time of year?

Among the Chaimas, as among all semi-barbarous people, the state of women is one of privation and suffering. The hardest work falls to them. In the evening when we saw the Chaimas return from their gardens the men carried only their machetes to cut their way through the undergrowth. The women walk loaded with bananas, a child in their arms and two others sometimes perched on top of their load. Despite this social inequality South American Indian women seem, in general, happier than North American ones. In the missions men work in the fields as much as women.