Our stay in Carichana let us gather our strength. Bonpland was carrying the germs of a serious illness, and needed rest. But as the delta of the rivers Horeda and Paruasi is covered with dense vegetation he could not resist a long botanical excursion and soaked himself several times a day in the water. Fortunately in the missionary's house we were supplied with bread made from maize flour, and even milk.

I acquired some statistical notions on the spot by consulting the Uruana missionary and the traders. The three beaches furnish annually some 5, botijas, or jars of oil. Two hundred eggs yield enough oil to fill a bottle, and 5, eggs to fill the jar. If we estimate the number of eggs laid by each turtle as 116, and reckon that one third are destroyed, we can calculate that 330, arrau turtles must lay 33 million eggs on the three shores. But this calculation is far too low. For example, the number of eggs that hatch before the cosecha is so prodigious that near the Uruana camp I saw the whole beach swarming with little turtles escaping from the Indian children.

The confidence of the Indians helped to make us feel braver. One agrees with them that tigers fear fire, and never attack a man in his hammock. If you ask the Indians why jungle animals make such a din at certain moments of the night they say, 'They are celebrating the full moon. I think that the din comes from deep in the jungle because a desperate fight is taking place. jaguars, for example, hunt tapir and peccaries, who protect themselves in large herds, trampling down the vegetation in their way.

According to my careful trigonometric calculations the Duida mountain rises 2, meters above the Esmeralda plain, some 2, meters, more or less, above sea-level. I say more or less because I had the bad luck to break my barometer before our arrival in Esmeralda. The rain had been so heavy that we could not protect this instrument from the damp and, with the unequal expansion of the wood, the tubes snapped. This accident especially annoyed me as no barometer had ever lasted so long on such a journey. The granite summit of the Duida falls so steeply that Indians have not managed to climb it. Though the mountains are not as high as people think, it is the highest point of the chain that stretches from the Orinoco to the Amazon.

The military establishment of this frontier consists of seventeen soldiers, ten of whom are detached in neighboring missions. The humidity is such that hardly four rifles work. The Portuguese have twenty-five better-dressed and better-armed men in the fort of San Jose de Maravitanos. In the San Carlos mission we found a garita, or square house, built with unbaked bricks, with six rooms. The fort, or as they prefer to call it, the Castillo de San Felipe, is on the right bank of the Río Negro, vis-à-vis San Carlos. The commander showed some scruples, and refused to allow Bonpland and myself to visit the fort as our passports clearly stated we could measure mountains and perform trigonometric operations on land, but we could not see inside fortified places. Our fellow traveler, Don Nicolás Soto, a Spanish officer, was luckier, and was allowed to cross the river.

In America, from the Eskimos to the Orinoco banks, from the burning plains to the icy Strait of Magellan, mother tongues, quite different in terms of their roots, share the same physiognomy. We recognize striking analogies in grammatical structure, not only in the more learned languages like that of the Incas, the Aymara, the Guaranu, Cora and Mexican, but also in the more primitive ones. It is thanks to this structural analogy rather than words in common that the mission Indian learns another American language more easily than a metropolitan one. In the Orinoco jungle I have met the dullest Indians who speak two or three languages.

Francisco Lozano, a laborer who lived in this village, presented a curious physiological phenomenon that struck our imagination, but did not contradict any laws of organic nature. This man breast-fed a child with his own milk. When the mother fell ill, the father, to pacify the child, took it to bed and pressed it to his nipples. Lozano, then thirty-two years old, had never noticed before that he had milk, but the irritation of the nipple sucked by the child caused liquid to accumulate. The milk was thick and very sweet. The father, astonished at how his breasts increased, suckled his child two or three times a day for five months. He attracted his neighbors' attention but, unlike someone living in Europe, never thought of exploiting this curiosity. We saw the certificate, drawn up on the spot, that attested this remarkable fact; eyewitnesses are still living. We were assured that during the breast-feeding the child received no other food but his father's milk. Lozano, away from Arenas when we visited, came to see us at Cumanà, accompanied by his son of already thirteen or fourteen. Bonpland carefully examined the father's breasts and found them wrinkled, like those of a woman who has suckled. (49)