The Caribs have so dominated such a large part of the continent that the memory of their ancient grandeur has left them with a dignity and national superiority that is obvious in their manners and way of speaking. 'We alone are a tribe, they say proverbially, 'the others (oquili) are here to serve us. This scorn that Caribs have for their old enemies is so accentuated that I have seen a ten-year-old child froth with rage when called a Cabre or a Cavere. Yet he had never seen anyone from such a tribe, decimated by the Caribs after a long resistance. Among half-civilized tribes, as much as in civilized Europe, we find similar deep-seated hates where the names of enemy people have passed into language as the worst kind of insult.

The natural sciences are connected by the same ties that link all natural phenomena together. The classification of species, which we should consider as fundamental to botany, and whose study has been facilitated by introducing natural methods, is to plant geography what descriptive mineralogy is to the rocks that form the outer crust of the earth. To understand the laws observed in the rocks, and to determine the age of successive formations and identify them from the most distant regions, a geologist should know the simple fossils that make up the mass of mountains. The same goes for the natural history that deals with how plants are related to each other, and with the soil and air. The advancement of plant geography depends greatly on descriptive botany; it would hinder the advancement of the sciences to postulate general ideas by neglecting particular facts.

As the Orinoco runs from south to north it crosses a chain of granite mountains. Twice checked in its course the river breaks furiously against rocks that form steps and transversal dykes. Nothing can be grander than this countryside. Neither the Tequendama Falls (99) near Bogotà, nor the magnificent cordilleras surpassed my first impressions of the Atures and Maypures rapids. Standing in a position that dominates the uninterrupted series of cataracts it is as if the river, lit by the setting sun, hangs above its bed like an immense sheet of foam and vapors. The two great and famous cataracts of the Orinoco are formed as the river breaks through the Parima mountains. Indians call them Mapara and Quituna, but missionaries have substituted these names with Atures and Maypures, named after tribes living in two villages near by. On the Caracas coast the two Great Cataracts are simply called the two Raudales, from the Spanish raudo, 'rushing'. (100)

On the 14th of September we descended the Cocollar towards the San Antonio mission. The road passes at first through savannahs strewn with huge calcareous blocks, and then enters a thick jungle. Having crossed two steep passes we saw before us a pretty valley, some 5 to 6 leagues long from east to west. Here lie the San Antonio and Guanaguana missions. The first is famous for its little brick church, with two towers and Doric columns, in a tolerable style. The prefect of the Capuchins finished building it in less than two summers, despite using only Indians from his village. The moulding of the capitals on the columns, the cornices and the frieze, decorated with suns and arabesques, were all modeled from clay mixed with ground brick. The provincial governor disapproved of such luxury in a mission and the church remained unfinished, much to the regret of the fathers. The Indians in San Antonio did not complain at all, indeed they secretly approved the governor's decision, as it favored their natural laziness.

At Javita we had the pleasure of meeting a cultured, reasonable monk. We had to stay in his house the four or five days it took to carry our canoe along the Pimichín portage. Delay allowed us to visit the region, as well as rid us of an irritation that had been annoying us for the last two days: an intense itching in the articulations of our fingers and the backs of our hands. The missionary said this came from aradores (literally, 'ploughers') encrusted under our skin. With the aid of a magnifying glass we saw only lines, or whitish parallel furrows, which show why it is called an arador. The monks called for a mulatta who knew how to deal with all the little insects that burrow into human skin, from niguas, nuches and coyas to the arador. She was the curandera, the local doctor. She promised to remove all the insects irritating us, one by one. She heated the tip of a little stick on the fire and dug it into the furrows in our skin. After a long examination she announced, with that pedantic gravity peculiar to colored people, that she had found an arador. I saw a little round bag that could have been the egg of the acaride. I should have been relieved when this clumsy mulatta poked out three or four more of these aradores. But as my skin was full of acarides I lost all patience with an operation that had already lasted until well into the night. The next day a Javita Indian cured us incredibly quickly. He brought a branch of a shrub called uzao, which had little shiny leathery leaves similar to the cassia. With its bark he prepared a cold bluish infusion that smelled of liquorice. When he beat it it became very frothy. Thanks to a washing with this uzao infusion the itching caused by the aradores disappeared. We were never able to find flowers or fruit of this uzao; the shrub seemed to belong to the leguminous family. We dreaded the pain caused by these aradores so much that we took various branches with us right up to San Carlos.

The San Francisco mission, situated on the left bank of the Casiquiare, was named after one of the leaders of the boundary expedition, Don Joseph Solano. This educated officer never got any further than San Fernando de Atabapo; he had never seen the Río Negro waters or the Casiquiare, or the Orinoco east of the Guaviare. Ignorance of the Spanish language drove geographers to locate erroneously on the famous La Cruz Olmedilla map the 400 league route made by Joseph Solano to the sources of the Orinoco. The San Francisco mission was founded not by monks but by military authorities. Following the boundary expedition, villages were built wherever an officer or a corporal stopped with his soldiers. Some of the Indians withdrew and remained independent; others, whose chiefs were caught, joined the missions. Where there was no church they were happy to raise a great red wooden cross, and to build a casa fuerte, that is, a house with long beams placed horizontally on top of each other, next to it. This house had two floors; upstairs were placed small cannons; downstairs two soldiers lived, served by Indian families. Tamed Indians established themselves around the casa fuerte. In the event of an attack soldiers would gather the Indians together by sounding the horn, or the baked-earth botuto. These were the nineteen so-called Christian establishments founded by Don Antonio Santos. Military posts had no effect in civilizing the Indians living there. They figured on maps and in mission works as pueblos (villages) and as reducciones apostòlicas.

The Indians enter the caves once a year near midsummer with poles to destroy most of the nests. Several thousand birds are killed; the older ones hover over their heads to defend their young, screaming horribly. The young, called los pollos del guàcharo, fall to the ground and are cut open on the spot. Their peritoneum is loaded with fat; a layer of fat reaches from the abdomen to the anus, forming a kind of wad between the bird's legs. During this period, called the cosecha de la manteca (oil harvest) in Caripe, the Indians build palm-leaf huts near the entrance and in the cave vestibule itself. We could see their remains. With a brushwood fire they melt the fat of the young birds just killed and pour it into clay pots. This fat is known as butter or guàcharo oil; it is semi-liquid, clear and odorless, and so pure that it lasts for a year without going rancid. In the Caripe convent kitchen they only use fat from this cave, and the food never had a disagreeable taste or smell thanks to this fat.