Our first camp, above the Vasiva, was easily set up. We found a corner of dry land free from shrubs at the south of the cano Curamuni in a place where we saw capuchin monkeys, so easily identified with their black beards and sad, wild look, as they climbed along horizontal branches of a genipap. The next five nights became more and more uncomfortable as we approached the Orinoco bifurcation. The exuberance of the vegetation increases to such a point that it is hard to imagine, even when you have got used to the Tropics. There is no beach; a palisade of bunched trees becomes the river bank. You see a channel some 200 toises wide bordered with two enormous walls carpeted with leaves and liana. We tried to get ashore but could not even get out of the canoe. Sometimes at sunset we would follow the bank for an hour to reach, not a clearing, but a less overgrown patch where our Indians with their machetes could cut down enough to let thirteen or fourteen people camp. We could not spend the night in the pirogue. The mosquitoes that tormented us during the day crowded towards evening under the toldo, that is, the roof made of palm leaves that sheltered us from rain. Never were our hands or faces more swollen. Even father Zea, boasting that in his cataract missions he had the biggest and bravest (los más valientes) mosquitoes, agreed that these Casiquiare bites were the most painful he had ever felt. In the middle of thick jungle it was difficult to find any wood to light our fire; the branches are so full of sap in this equatorial region where it always rains that they hardly burn. Where there are no arid beaches we hardly ever came across that old wood which Indians say has been 'cooked in the sun'. A fire was only necessary to scare away jungle animals: we had such a low stock of food that we did not need wood to cook.