Our mules waited for us on the left bank of the Orinoco. The plant collections and geological specimens brought from Esmeralda and the Río Negro had greatly increased our baggage. It would have been dangerous to leave our herbals behind, but this added weight meant we now faced a tediously slow journey across the llanos. The heat was excessive due to the bare ground's reverberations. The thermometer by day recorded between 30°C and 34°C, and at night 27°C to 28°C. Like everywhere in the Tropics it was less the actual degree of heat than its duration that affected our bodies. We spent thirteen days crossing the steppes, resting a little in the Carib missions and in the village of Payo.

An alley of avocado trees led us to the Aragonese Capuchins' hospice. We stopped in front of a Brazil-wood cross, surrounded with benches on which the sick monks sit and say their rosaries, in the middle of a spacious square. The convent backs on to an enormous perpendicular wall of rock, covered with thick vegetation. Dazzling white stone appears every now and then through the foliage. It would be hard to imagine a more picturesque place. Instead of European beeches and maples you find here the imposing ceiba trees and the praga and irasse palms. Numerous springs bubble out from the mountainsides that encircle the Caripe basin and whose southern slopes rise to some 1, feet in height. These springs issue mainly from crevices or narrow gorges. The humidity they bring favors the growth of huge trees, and the Indians, who prefer solitary places, set up their conucos along these ravines. Banana and papaw trees grow around groves of arborescent ferns. This mixture of wild and cultivated plants gives a special charm to this place. From afar, on the naked mountainside, you can pick out the springs by the thick tangles of vegetation, which at first seem to hang from the rock, and then, as they descend into the valley, follow the meandering streams.

The further we left the African coast behind the weaker the wind became: it was often completely calm for hours, followed regularly by electrical phenomena. Thick black perfectly shaped clouds formed in the east; it seemed as if a squall might force us to fasten the topsail; then the wind would rise again, a few large raindrops would fall, and the storm would vanish without a single clap of thunder. It is thanks to these squalls alternating with dead calms that you are able to cross the ocean from the Canaries to the West Indies during June and July.

It was already dark when we crossed the Orinoco bed for the last time. We meant to spend the night near the small San Rafael fort and begin the journey across the Venezuelan steppes at dawn. Nearly six weeks had passed since our arrival at Angostura, we dearly wanted to reach the Cumanà or Nueva Barcelona coasts to find a boat to take us to Cuba and then on to Mexico. After several months on mosquito-infested rivers in small canoes, a long sea journey excited our imaginations.

The Indian pilot led us across his garden, which seemed more a copse than cultivated land. As proof of the land's fertility he showed us a silk-cotton tree (Bombax heptaphyllum) whose trunk measured nearly 2. feet in diameter after only four years' growth. However, I think the Indian's estimate of the tree's age was somewhat exaggerated. Still on the Cumana beach, in the Guaiqueri's garden, we saw for the first time a guama (Inga spuria) loaded with flowers, remarkable for the length and silvery brilliance of their numerous stamen. We passed the neatly arranged streets of the Indian quarters, bordered with small new houses of attractive design This part of the town has just been rebuilt after the earthquake a year and a half before our arrival that destroyed Cumana. Hardly had we crossed the wooden bridge over the Manzanares river, full of bavas or small crocodiles, than we saw traces of that terrible catastrophe everywhere; new buildings rose over the ruins of the old.

During our stay at Cura we made numerous excursions to the rocky islands in the middle of Lake Valencia, to the hot springs at Mariara, and the high mountain called El Cucurucho de Coco. A narrow, dangerous path leads to the port of Turiamo and the famous coastal cacao plantations. Throughout all our excursions we were surprised not only by the progress of culture but also by the increase in the numbers of the free, hard-working population, used to manual work and too poor to buy slaves. Everywhere whites and mulattos had bought small isolated farms. Our host, whose father enjoyed an income of 40, piastres a year, had more land than he could farm; he distributed plots in the Aragua valley to poor families who wanted to grow cotton. He tried to surround his enormous plantation with free working men, because they wanted to work for themselves, or for others. Count Tovar was busy trying to abolish slavery and hoped to make slaves less necessary for the important estates, and to offer the freed slaves land to become farmers themselves. When he left for Europe he had broken up and rented land around Cura. Four years later, on returning to America, he found fine cotton fields and a little village called Punta Samuro, which we often visited with him. The inhabitants are all mulatto, zambo (80) and freed slaves. The rent is ten piastres a fanega of land; it is paid in cash or cotton. As the small farmers are often in need, they sell their cotton at modest prices. They sell it even before harvest, and this advance is used by the rich landowners to make the poor dependent on them as day workers. The price of labor is less than it is in France. A free man is paid five piastres a month without food, which costs very little as meat and vegetables are abundant. I like quoting these details about colonial agriculture because they prove to Europeans that there is no doubt that sugar, cotton and indigo can be produced by free men, and that the miserable slaves can become peasants, farmers and landowners.

We walked round the island with the missionary and a pulpero who boasted that he had been visiting the Indians' camp and the pesca de tortugas for over ten years. People come to this part of the Orinoco in the same way we visit fairs in Frankfurt or Beaucaire. We were on a plain of perfectly smooth sand. 'As far as the eye can see, they told us, 'a layer of sand covers the turtle eggs. The missionary had a long pole in his hand. He showed us that by sounding with this pole (vara) he could determine the depth of the stratum of eggs in the same way a miner discovers the limits of a bed of marl, bog iron or coal. By thrusting the pole perpendicularly into the sand he immediately feels, by the lack of resistance, that he has penetrated into the cavity hiding the eggs. We saw that the stratum is generally spread with such uniformity that the pole finds it everywhere in a radius of 10 toises around any given spot. People speak of 'square poles of eggs'; it is like a minefield divided into regularly exploited lots. The stratum of eggs is far from covering the whole island; it is no longer found where land rises abruptly because the turtles cannot climb to these plateaux. I reminded my guides that Father Gumilla's vivid descriptions assured us that the Orinoco beaches have less grains of sand than turtles, and that they were so numerous that if men and tigers did not annually kill thousands of them the turtles would stop boats sailing upstream. 'Son cuentos de frailes, the pulpero from Angostura whispered; for the only travelers in these lands are poor missionaries and what one calls monks' tales here are what in Europe would be called travelers' tales.