The port of Cumanà lies some 7 leagues from Cumanacoa. It hardly ever rains in the former place, while in the latter the rainy season lasts seven months. In Cumanacoa the dry season stretches from the winter solstice to the spring equinox. Sporadic showers are common in April, May and June; then a drought begins again until the summer solstice or the end of August. Then the rainy season proper starts and lasts until November, and water pours down in torrents from the sky.

I remained two months in Caracas. Bonpland and I lived in a large virtually isolated house in the elevated part of the city. From the gallery we could see the La Silla peak, the serrated crest of the Galipano, and the cheerful Guaire valley whose leafy fields contrasted with the curtain of the mountains around. It was the dry season. To improve the land the savannah and grass on the rocks were set on fire. Seen from far off, these great fires created surprising light effects. Wherever the savannah climbed up the slopes and filled the gorges cut by torrential waters these strips of land on fire seemed at night like lava hanging above the valley.

On the 21st of May we again entered the bed of the Orinoco, 3 leagues above the Esmeralda mission. It had been a month since we had left this river near the mouth of the Guaviare. We still had 750 leagues to navigate as far as Angostura, but it was downstream, and this made the thought less painful. Going downstream you follow the middle of the river bed where there are less mosquitoes. Going upstream you are forced to stick close to the banks, to benefit from eddies and counter-currents, where the jungle and organic detritus thrown up on the beaches attract insects of the Tipulary family. The point where the Orinoco bifurcates is incredibly imposing. High granitic mountains rise on the northern shore, among them the Maraguaca and the Duida. There are no mountains at all on the left bank, or to the west or east as far as the mouth of the Tamatama. (118)

In the overloaded pirogue, which was only 3 feet deep, there was no other room for the dried plants, trunks, sextant, compass and meteorological instruments but under the lattice of branches on which we were obliged to lie down for most of our trip. To take the smallest object from a trunk, or to use an instrument, we had to moor up and get ashore. To these inconveniences can be added the torment of mosquitoes that accumulate under the low roof, and the heat coming from the palm leaves continually exposed to the burning sun. We tried everything to improve our situation, without any results. While one of us hid under a sheet to avoid insects, the other insisted on lighting greenwood under the toldo to chase off the mosquitoes with the smoke. Pain in our eyes and increasing heat in a climate that was already asphyxiating made both these means impractical. With some gaiety of temper, with looking after each other and taking a lively interest in the majestic nature of these great river valleys, the travelers put up with the evils that became habitual. I have entered into such minute details in order to describe how we navigated on the Orinoco, and to show that despite our goodwill, Bonpland and I were not able to multiply our observations during this section of the journey.

In 1797 the San Fernando missionary had led his men to the banks of the Guaviare river on one of those hostile incursions banned both by religion and Spanish law. They found a Guahiba mother with three children in a hut, two of whom were not yet adults. They were busy preparing cassava flour. Resistance was impossible; their father had gone out fishing, so the mother tried to run off with children. She had just reached the savannah when the Indians, who hunt people the way whites hunt blacks in Africa, caught her. The mother and children were tied up and brought back to the river bank. The monks were waiting for this expedition to end, without suffering any of the dangers. Had the mother resisted the Indians would have killed her; anything is allowed in this hunting of souls (conquista espiritual), and it is especially children that are captured and treated as poitos or slaves in the Christian missions. They brought the prisoners to San Fernando, hoping that the mother would not find her way back by land to her home. Separated from those children who had gone fishing with their father the day she was kidnapped, this poor woman began to show signs of the deepest despair. She wanted to bring those children in the power of the missionaries back home, and several times ran off with them from the San Fernando village but the Indians hunted her down each time. After severely punishing her the missionary took the cruel decision of separating the mother from her two infants. She was led alone to a mission on the Río Negro, up the Atabapo river. Loosely tied up, she sat ill the bow of the boat. She had not been told where she was going; but she guessed by the sun's position that she was being taken away from her house and native land. She managed to break her bonds and jumped into the water and swam to the river bank. The current pushed her to a bank of rock, which is named after her today. She climbed up and walked into the jungle. But the head of the mission ordered his Indians to follow and capture her. She was again caught by the evening. She was stretched out on the rock (the Piedra de la Madre) where she was beaten with manatee whips. Her hands tied up behind her back with the strong cords of the mavacure, she was then dragged to the Javita mission and thrown into one of the inns called casas del rey. It was the rainy season and the night was very dark. Impenetrable forests separate the Javita and San Fernando missions some 25 leagues apart in a straight line. The only known route was by river. Nobody ever tried to go by land from one mission to another, even if only a few leagues away. But this did not prevent a mother separated from her children. Her children were at San Fernando so she had to find them, rescue them from Christians, and bring them back to their father on the Guaviare. The Guahiba woman was not closely supervised in the inn. As her hands were bloodied the Javita Indians had loosened her bindings. With her teeth she managed to break the cords, and she disappeared into the night. On the fourth day she was seen prowling round the hut where her children were being kept at the San Fernando mission. This woman had just carried out, added the monk telling us this sad story, 'something that the toughest Indian would not have even considered. She had crossed the jungle in a season when the sky is continuously covered with cloud, when the sun appears. only for a few minutes for days on end. Had she followed the flow of water? But flooding had forced her to walk far from the river, in the middle of jungles where the river is imperceptible. How many times must she have been blocked by thorny liana growing round trees! How many times must she have swum across streams! What on earth could this luckless woman have eaten during her four days' walk? She said that she had eaten only those large black ants called vachacos that climb up trees and hang resinous nests from branches. We pressed the missionary to tell us whether the Guahiba woman had finally enjoyed peace and happiness with her family. He did not want to satisfy our curiosity. But on our return from the Río Negro we learned that this Indian woman was not even left to recover from her wounds before she was again separated from her children, and sent to a mission on the Upper Orinoco. She died by refusing to eat food, as do all Indians when faced with great calamities. (112)

We began to load the new pirogue. It was, like all Indian canoes, made from one tree trunk, hollowed out by axe and fire. It was 40 feet long and 3 feet wide. Three people could not squeeze together from one side to the other. These pirogues are so unstable that the weight must be distributed very equally and if you want to stand up for a second you must warn the rowers (bogas) to lean over the other side. Without this precaution water would pour in on the lopsided side. It is difficult to form an idea of the inconveniences of these miserable boats.

The Indians who go harvesting take thousands of dried or lightly cooked eggs away to their villages. Our towers always had some in baskets or cotton bags. When they are well preserved the taste is not too bad. They showed us large turtle shells emptied by jaguars, who wait for the turtles on the beach where the eggs are laid. They attack them on the sand. To eat them they turn them upside down so that the undershell is right-side up. In this position the turtles cannot right themselves, and as jaguars turn many more over than they can eat in one night the Indians avail themselves of the cats' greed and cunning. If you think how hard it is for a travelling naturalist to pull the turtle's body out without separating it from the cuirass of the shell you can only admire the litheness of the jaguar's paw as it empties the two-sided shield of the arrau as if the muscular ligaments had been severed by a surgeon. The jaguar chases turtles into the water, even digs up the eggs, and, along with the crocodile, heron and gallinazo vulture, is one of the cruellest enemies of the newborn turtles. When the first rains come called 'turtle rains' (peje canepori) - the wild Indians go along the Orinoco banks with their poisoned arrows and kill the turtles as they warm themselves in the sun.