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.

When one speaks in Europe of a Guianan Indian we imagine a man whose head and waist are decorated with beautiful macaw, toucan and hummingbird feathers. Our painters and sculptors have for a long time seen these ornaments as typical of the native Americans. We were surprised not to find, on any of the Orinoco and Casiquiare banks, these fine feathers that travelers so frequently reported from Cayenne and Demerara. Most of the Guianan Indians, even those with the most developed intellectual faculties, who cultivate food and weave with cotton, are naked and poor. Extreme heat and sweating make clothes unbearable.

We walked for hours in the shade of these plant vaults that scarcely let us catch glimpses of the blue sky, which appeared to be more of a deep indigo blue because the green, verging on brown, of tropical plants seemed so intense. A great fern tree (perhaps Aspidium caducum) rose above masses of scattered rock. For the first time we saw those nests in the shape of bottles or small bags that hang from the lower branches. They are the work of that clever builder the oriole, whose song blends with the noisy shrieking of parrots and macaws. These last, so well known for their vivid colors, fly around in pairs, while the parrots proper fly in flocks of hundreds. A man must live in these regions, particularly the hot Andean valleys, to understand how these birds can sometimes drown the noise of waterfalls with their voices.

Lake Valencia is full of islands, which embellish the countryside with the picturesque form of their rocks and by the kind of vegetation that covers them. Tropical lakes have this advantage over alpine ones. The islands, without counting Morro and Cabrera, which are already joined to the mainland, are fifteen in number. They are partially cultivated, and very fertile due to the vapors rising from the lake. Burro, the largest island, some 2 miles long, is inhabited by mestizo families who rear goats. These simple people rarely visit the Mocundo coast. The lake seems gigantic to them: they produce bananas, cassava, milk and fish. A hut built of reeds, some hammocks woven with cotton grown in neighboring fields, a large stone on which they build their fires, and the ligneous fruit of the tutuma to draw water with are their sole household needs. The old mestizo who offered us goat's milk had a lovely daughter. We learned from our guide that isolation had made him as suspicious as if he lived in a city. The night before our arrival some hunters had visited the island. Night surprised them and they preferred to sleep out in the open rather than return to Mocundo. This news spread alarm around the island. The father forced his young daughter to climb a very tall zamang or mimosa, which grows on the plain at some distance from the hut. He slept at the foot of this tree, and didn't let his daughter down until the hunters had left.

As soon as you enter the basin of the Atabapo river everything changes: the air, the color of the water, the shape of the river-side trees. By day you no longer suffer the torment of mosquitoes; and their long-legged cousins the zancudos become rare at night. Beyond the San Fernando mission these nocturnal insects disappear altogether. The Orinoco waters are turbid, full of earthy matter, and in the coves give off a faint musky smell from the amount of dead crocodiles and other putrefying animals. To drink that water we had to filter it through a linen cloth. The waters of the Atabapo, on the other hand, are pure, taste good, are without smell, and appear brownish in reflected light and yellow under the sun.

Two leagues south-east of Nueva Barcelona there is a high chain of mountains backing on the Cerro Brigantín known as the Aguas Calientes (Hot Waters). When I felt my health had returned we made an excursion there. This trip ended with an unfortunate accident. Our host had lent us his best saddle horses. We had been warned not to cross the Narigual river on horseback so we crossed on a kind of bridge made of tree trunks; the animals swam across as we held the bridles. Suddenly my horse disappeared and struggled under water. There was no way I could find out what had pulled it under. Our guides guessed that it must have been a cayman, common in this region, that had seized its legs.