Despite the indignation of our guides we opened various mapires to study the skulls. They were all typical of the American race, with one or two Caucasian types. We took several skulls with us, as well as a skeleton of a six- or seven-year-old child, and two Atures adults. All these bones, partly painted red, and partly covered in resin, lay in the baskets already described. They made up the whole load of one mule and, as we knew all about the superstitious aversions that Indians have about corpses once they have been buried, we covered the baskets with newly woven mats. But nothing could fool the Indians and their acute sense of smell. Wherever we stopped Indians ran to surround our mules and admire the monkeys we had bought on the Orinoco. But hardly had they touched our luggage than they announced the certain death of the mule that 'carried the dead'. In vain we tried to dissuade them and said the baskets contained crocodile and manatee skeletons. They insisted that they smelled the resin that covered the bones 'of their old relations'. One of the skulls we brought from the Ataruipe cavern has been painted by my old master Blumenbach. But the skeletons of the Indians have been lost with much of our collection in a storm off Africa, where our travelling companion and friend the Franciscan monk Juan Gonzalez also drowned. We left the burial-ground of this extinct race in a sad mood.