At the end of April Bonpland and I had completed the observations we intended to make at the northern extreme of the torrid zone and were about to leave for Veracruz with Admiral Ariztizabal's fleet. But we were misled by false information concerning Captain Baudin's journey and decided to forgo our plan of passing Mexico on our way to the Philippine Islands. A newspaper announced that the two French sloops, the Géographie and the Naturaliste, had set sail for Cape Horn and would call in at Chile and Peru on their way to New Holland. This news shook me. I was reminded of my original intention in Paris when I had asked the Directorate to hasten Captain Baudin's departure. (138)

It took us three days to reach the Cari Carib missions. The ground was not as cracked by the drought as in the Calabozo plains. A few showers had revived the vegetation. We saw a few fan palms (Corypha tectorum), rhopalas (Chaparro) and malpighias with leathery, shiny leaves growing far apart from each other. From far off you recognize where there might be water from groups of mauritia palms. It was the season in which they are loaded with enormous clusters of red fruit looking like fir-cones. Our monkeys loved this fruit, which tasted like overripe apples. The monkeys were carried with our baggage on the backs of mules and did all they could to reach the clusters hanging over their heads. The plains seemed to ripple from the mirages. When, after travelling for an hour, we reached those palms standing like masts on the horizon, we were amazed to realize how many things are linked to the existence of one single plant. The wind, losing its force as it strikes leaves and branches, piles sand round the trunks. The smell of fruit and the bright green of the leaves attract passing birds that like to sway on the arrow-like branches of the palms. All around you hear a murmur of sound. Oppressed by the heat, and used to the bleak silence of the llanos, you think you feel cooler just by hearing the sound of branches swaying. Insects and worms, so rare in the llanos, thrive here so that even one stunted tree, which no traveler would have noticed in the Orinoco jungles, spreads life around it in the desert.