In two days we went down the Orinoco from Carichana to the Uruana mission, again passing the famous Baraguan Strait. The Uruana mission is situated in a very picturesque place. The little Indian village backs on to a high granite mountain. Rocks rise like pillars above the highest jungle trees. Nowhere else is the Orinoco more majestic than when viewed from Father Ramon Bueno's missionary hut. It is more than 2, toises wide and runs in a straight line east like a canal. The mission is inhabited by Otomacs, a barbaric tribe who offered us an extraordinary physiological phenomenon. The Otomacs eat earth; every day for several months they swallow quantities of earth to appease their hunger without any ill effect on their health. This verifiable fact has become, since my return to Europe, the object of lively disputes. Though we could stay only one day in Uruana it was sufficient to find out how the poya (balls of earth) are prepared, to examine the reserves of this the Indians keep, and how much is eaten in twenty-four hours. I also found traces of this perverse appetite among the Guamos, between the Meta and the Apure. Everybody speaks of earth eating or geophagie as anciently known. I shall limit myself to what I saw and heard from the missionary, doomed to twelve years among this wild, unruly Otomac tribe.