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.

The Indians of this area have preserved the belief that 'during the great flood, when their ancestors had to take to the canoes to escape, the sea waves beat against the Encaramada rocks'. This tradition is found in nearly all the tribes of the Upper Orinoco. When the Tamanacu are asked how the human race survived that great catastrophe they answer: 'A man and a woman saved themselves on a high mountain called Tamanacu and there threw seed from the mauritia palm over their heads, and little men and women were born from the seeds who repopulated the world. Among wild tribes we find a simple version of a legend that the Greeks had embellished with their great imagination! A few leagues from Encaramada a rock called Tepu-mereme (Painted Rock) rises in the middle of the savannah. It is covered with animal drawings and symbolic signs. The representations that we have found on rocks in uninhabited places - stars, suns, jaguars, crocodiles - do not seem to be related to religious cults. These hieroglyphic figures are frequently carved so high up that only scaffolding could reach them. When we asked the Indians how they could have carved those images, they answered, smiling, as if only whites could ignore such an obvious answer: During the great waters, their ancestors reached those rocks in their canoes.

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.

When we were about to leave the Can mission we had an argument with our Indian muleteers. To our amazement they had discovered that we were transporting skeletons from the Ataruipe caves, and were sure that the mule carrying 'the corpses of our ancient relatives' would die on the journey. All our precautions to hide the bones had been useless; nothing escapes the Carib's sense of smell. We needed the missionary's authority to be able to leave. We had to cross the Can river in a boat and ford, or perhaps I should say swim, the Río de Agua Clara. Quicksand on the bottom made the crossing during the floods very tiring. You are surprised to find such strong currents in flat land. We spent unpleasant nights out at Matagorda and Los Riecitos. Everywhere we saw the same things: small huts made of reed and roofed with leather, men on horseback with lances, guarding the cattle, semi-wild herds of horned cattle all the same color, fighting for grass with horses and mules. Not a goat or a sheep in these immense steppes!

On the point of leaving we were surrounded by those inhabitants who called themselves whites and Spaniards. They begged us to ask the Angostura Government to let them return to the llanos, or at least to the Rio Negro missions. 'However serious our crimes, they said, 'we have expiated them after twenty years of hell in this swarm of mosquitoes. I pleaded their case in a report to the government on the industrial and commercial state of these countries.