When we stepped into the streets of Santa Cruz the heat was suffocating, though the thermometer recorded only 25°C. After breathing sea air for such a long time one suffers on land, not because the air contains more oxygen at sea but because it is less charged with the gases emanating from rotting animal and vegetable substances.

If America does not occupy an important place in the history of mankind, and in the revolutions that have shattered the world, it does offer a wide field for a naturalist. Nowhere else does nature so vividly suggest general ideas on the cause of events, and their mutual interrelationships. I do not mean by this solely the overpowering vegetation and freshness of organic life, the different climates we experience as we climb the cordilleras and navigate those immense rivers, but also the geology and natural history of an unknown continent. A traveler can count himself lucky if he has taken advantage of his travels by adding new facts to the mass of those previously discovered!

The Indians who go harvesting take thousands of dried or lightly cooked eggs away to their villages. Our towers always had some in baskets or cotton bags. When they are well preserved the taste is not too bad. They showed us large turtle shells emptied by jaguars, who wait for the turtles on the beach where the eggs are laid. They attack them on the sand. To eat them they turn them upside down so that the undershell is right-side up. In this position the turtles cannot right themselves, and as jaguars turn many more over than they can eat in one night the Indians avail themselves of the cats' greed and cunning. If you think how hard it is for a travelling naturalist to pull the turtle's body out without separating it from the cuirass of the shell you can only admire the litheness of the jaguar's paw as it empties the two-sided shield of the arrau as if the muscular ligaments had been severed by a surgeon. The jaguar chases turtles into the water, even digs up the eggs, and, along with the crocodile, heron and gallinazo vulture, is one of the cruellest enemies of the newborn turtles. When the first rains come called 'turtle rains' (peje canepori) - the wild Indians go along the Orinoco banks with their poisoned arrows and kill the turtles as they warm themselves in the sun.

I have no doubt that from remotest times the whole valley was filled with water. Everywhere the shape of the promontories and their steep slopes reveals the ancient shore of this alpine lake. We find vast tracts of land, formerly flooded, now cultivated with banana, sugar cane and cotton. Wherever a hut is built on the lake shore you can see how year by year the water recedes. As the water decreases, you can see how islands begin to join the land while others form promontories or become hills. We visited two islands still completely surrounded by water and found, under the scrub, on small flats between 4 and 8 toises above the water-level, fine sand mixed with helicites deposited by waves. On all these islands you will discover clear traces of the gradual lowering of the water.