We spent only one day at San Fernando de Atabapo, despite the village, with its pirijao palms and their peach-like fruit, promising us a delightful refuge. Tame pauxis (Crax alector) ran round the Indian huts; in one of which we saw a very rare monkey that lives on the banks of the Guaviare. It is called the caparro, which I have made known in my Observations on Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. Its hair is grey and extremely soft to touch. It has a round head, and a sweet, agreeable expression.

A little above the Davipe mission the Río Negro receives a branch of the Casiquiare whose existence is a remarkable phenomenon in the history of river branching. This branch emerges from the Casiquiare, north of Vasiva, under the name Itinivi; and after crossing a flat, virtually uninhabited country some 25 leagues long, pours into the Río Negro under the name of Río Conorichite. It seemed to me, near its mouth, to be 120 toises wide, and added large quantities of white waters to the black waters. Even though the Conorichite current is very fast, you shorten the journey from Davipe to Esmeralda by three days using this canal. It is not surprising to find a double communication between the Casiquiare and the Río Negro when you recall that so many American rivers form deltas when they meet other rivers. In this way the Branco and the Jupura pour into the Río Negro and Amazon through many branches. At the confluence with the Jupura there is another more extraordinary phenomenon. Before joining the Amazon this river, which is its main recipient, sends three branches called Uaranapu, Manhama and Avateprana to the Jupura, which is none other than its tributary. The Amazon thus sends its waters into the Jupura before receiving the waters of the latter back.

We dared to cross the last half of the Atures raudal in our boat. We landed every now and then on rocks, which act as dykes, forming islands. Sometimes water crashes over them, sometimes it falls into them with a deafening noise. It was here that we saw one of the most extraordinary scenes. The river rolled its waters over our heads, like the sea crashing against reefs, but in the entrance to a cavern we could stay dry as the large sheet of water formed an arch over the rocks. We had the chance to view this bizarre sight for longer than we wished. Our canoe should have passed around a narrow island on the eastern bank and picked us up after a long detour. We waited for several hours as night and a furious Storm approached. Rain poured down. We began to fear that our fragile boat had smashed against some rocks and that the Indians, as indifferent as ever to the distress of others, had gone off to the mission. There were only three of us, soaked to the skin and worrying about our pirogue, as well as thinking about spending the night in the Tropics, sleeping in the din of the cataracts. M. Bonpland proposed to leave me alone on the island with Don Nicolas Soto and swim the bit of the river between the granite dykes. He hoped to reach the jungle and seek help from Father Zea at Atures. We finally managed to dissuade him. He had no idea about the labyrinth of canals that split up the Orinoco or of the dangerous eddies. Then what happened under our noses as we were discussing this proved that the Indians had been wrong to say there were no crocodiles in the cataracts. We had placed our little monkeys on the tip of our island. Soaked by the rain, and sensitive to any fall in temperature, they began to howl, attracting two very old lead-grey crocodiles. Seeing them made me realize how dangerous our swim in this same raudal on our way up had been. After a long wait our Indians turned up just as the sun was setting.

April 10th. We were unable to set sail until ten in the morning. It was hard to adapt to the new pirogue, which we saw as a new prison. To make it wider at the back of the boat we made branches into a kind of trellis, which stuck out on both sides. Unfortunately the leaf roof of this lattice-work was so low that you either had to lie down, and consequently saw nothing, or you had to stay hunched over. The need to transport pirogues across rapids, and even from one river to another, and the fear of giving too much hold to the wind by raising the toldo made this construction necessary for the little boats going up the Río Negro. The roof was designed for four people stretched Out on the deck or lattice-work, but your legs stuck far out, and when it rained half your body got wet. Worse still, you lie on oxhides or tiger skins, and the branches under the skins hurt you when you lie down. The front of the boat was filled with the Indian rowers, armed with 3-foot-long paddles in the form of spoons. They are all naked, sitting in twos, and row beautifully together. Their songs are sad and monotonous. The little cages with our birds and monkeys, increasing as we went on, were tied to the toldo and the prow. It was our travelling zoo. Despite losses due to accidents and sunstroke, we counted fourteen little animals when we came back from the Casiquiare. Every night when we established camp, our zoo and instruments occupied the middle; around them we hung our hammocks, then the Indians' hammocks and, outside, the fires we thought indispensable to scare off jaguars. At sunrise our caged monkeys answered the cries of the jungle monkeys.

We were struck to see in the Parurama camp that old women were more preoccupied in painting themselves than young ones. We saw an Otomac woman having her hair rubbed with turtle oil and her back painted with annatto by her two daughters. The ornaments consisted of a kind of lattice-work in crossed black lines on a red background. It was work needing incredible patience. We came back from a long herborization and the painting was still only half done. It is all the more amazing that this research into ornament does not result in tattooing, for the painting done so carefully washes off if the Indian exposes herself to a downpour. Some nations paint themselves to celebrate festivals; others are covered in paint all year round. With these Indians annatto is seen as so indispensable that men and women have less shame in appearing without a guayuco (97) than without paint. The Orinoco guayucos are made from bark and cotton. Men wear larger ones than women who, according to the missionaries, seem to feel less shame than men. Shouldn't we attribute this indifference, this lack of shame in the women in tribes that are not depraved, to the state of numbness and slavery to which the female sex has been reduced in South America by the injustice and power of men?

The road from San Fernando to Cumanacoa passes through small plantations in a humid, open valley. We forded numerous streams. In the shade the thermometer did not rise above 30°C, but we were exposed to the sun's rays because the bamboos along the path gave only a feeble shade and we suffered a lot from the heat. We passed through the village of Arenas, inhabited by Indians of the same race as those at San Fernando. But Arenas is no longer a mission, and the Indians, governed by a regular priest, are less naked and more civilized. Their church is known in the area for the primitive paintings on its walls. A narrow frieze encloses pictures of armadillos, caymans, jaguars and other New World animals.

May 6th. We set off at dawn after inspecting the bottom of our canoe. We counted on our boat surviving another 300 leagues of navigation down the Río Negro, up the Casiquiare and back down the Orinoco again to Angostura. The Pimichín is about as wide as the Seine in Paris but little trees that like water narrow the river so much that only a canal of some 15 to 20 toises remains. This caìo is navigable all year round. After following it for four hours we at last reached the Río Negro.