We passed the night of the 20th of May, the last on the Casiquiare, near the bifurcation with the Orinoco. We hoped to make some astronomical observations as we saw extraordinary shooting stars visible through the mist. Indians, who do not embellish their imagination through words, call shooting stars the 'piss of the stars', and dew the 'spit of the stars'. But the clouds thickened and prevented us from seeing both meteors and stars.

The ground of the island rises to form an amphitheatre and, as in Peru and Mexico, contains in miniature all the possible climates, from African heat to alpine cold. (14) The mean temperatures of Santa Cruz, the port of Orotava, Orotava itself and La Laguna form a descending series. In southern Europe the change of seasons is too strongly felt to offer the same advantages. Tenerife on the other hand, on the threshold of the Tropics and a few days' journey from Spain, benefits from a good part of what nature has lavished in the Tropics. Its flora include the beautiful and imposing bananas and palms. He who is able to feel nature's beauty finds in this precious island a far more effective remedy than the climate. Nowhere else in the world seems more appropriate to dissipate melancholy and restore peace to troubled minds than Tenerife and Madeira. These effects are due not only to the magnificent situation and to the purity of air, but above all to the absence of slavery, which so deeply revolts us in all those places where Europeans have brought what they call their 'enlightenment and their 'commerce' to their colonies

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.

It is well established in the missions that there is no cure for curare that is fresh and concentrated and that has remained long enough in the wound for it to enter the bloodstream. Indians who have been wounded in wars by arrows dipped in curare described to us symptoms that resembled those of snake bites. The individual feels a congestion in his head, and giddiness makes him sit down. He feels nausea, vomits several times, and is tortured by thirst as the area around his wound becomes numb.