The old Indian called 'master of the poison' was flattered by our interest in his chemical procedures. He found us intelligent enough to think that we could make soap; for making soap, after making curare, seemed to him the greatest of human inventions. Once the poison was poured into its jars, we accompanied the Indian to the juvias fiesta. They were celebrating the Brazil-nut harvest, and became wildly drunk. The hut where the Indians had gathered over several days was the strangest sight you could imagine. Inside there were no tables or benches, only large smoked and roasted monkeys lined up symmetrically against the wall. These were marimondas (Ateles belzebuth) and the bearded capuchins. The way these animals, which look so like human beings, are roasted helps you understand why civilized people find eating them so repulsive. A little grill made of a hard wood is raised about a foot from the ground. The skinned monkey is placed on top in a sitting position so that he is held up by his long thin hands; sometimes the hands are crossed over his shoulders. Once it is fixed to the grill a fire is lit underneath; flames and smoke cover the monkey, which is roasted and smoked at the same time. Seems Indians eat a leg or arm of a roasted monkey makes you realize why cannibalism is not so repugnant to Indians. Roasted monkeys especially those with very round heads, look horribly like children. Europeans who are forced to eat them prefer to cut off the head and hands before serving up the rest of the monkey The flesh of the monkey is so lean and dry that Bonpland kept an arm and a hand, roasted in Esmeralda, in his Paris collections. After many years it did not smell in the least.

Our guides led us to the 'mine'. We turned west, and finally reached the Quebrada de Oro. On the hillside there was hardly a trace of a quartz seam. The landslide, caused by rain, had so transformed the ground that we could not even think of exploring it. Huge trees now grew where twenty years before gold seekers had worked. It is likely that there are veins in the mica-slate containing this venerable metal, but how could I judge if it was worth exploiting or if the metal was to be found in nodules? To compensate our efforts, we set to botanizing in the thick wood around the Hato.

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 amount of identical species in the two continents and in the two hemispheres is far less than early travelers once led us to think. The high mountains of equinoctial America have their plantains, valerians, arenarias, ranunculuses, medlars, oaks and pines, which from their features we could confuse with European ones, but they are all specifically different. When nature does not present the same species, she repeats the same genera. Neighboring species are often found at enormous distances from each other, in low regions of a temperate zone, and on mountains on the equator. And, as we found on La Silla at Caracas, they are not the European genera that have colonized mountains of the torrid zone, but genera of the same tribe, which have taken their place and are hard to distinguish

The electrometer gave no sign of electricity. As the storm gathered the blue of the sky changed to grey. The thermometer rose 3'C, as is usual in the Tropics, and a heavy rain fell. Being sufficiently adapted to the climate not to fear the effect of a tropical downpour we stayed on the shore to observe the electrometer. I held it more than twenty minutes in my hand, 6 feet above the ground. For several minutes the electric charge remained the same, and then I noticed that the electricity in the atmosphere was first positive, then nil, then negative. I have gone into these details on the electric charge in the atmosphere because newly arrived European travelers usually describe just their impressions of a tropical storm. In a country where the year is divided into two halves, the dry and the wet season, or as the Indians say in their expressive language, 'of sun and rain', it is interesting to follow meteorological phenomena as one season turns into the next.

The passage from the mouth of the Río Negro to Grand Para took only twenty to twenty-five days, so we could have gone down the Amazon as far as the Brazilian coast just as easily as returning by the Casiquiare to Caracas. We were told at San Carlos that political circumstances made it difficult to cross from Spanish to Portuguese colonies, but we did not know until our return to Europe what danger we would have been exposed to had we gone as far as Barcellos. It was known in Brazil, probably through newspapers, whose indiscretion is not helpful for travelers, that I was going to visit the Río Negro missions and examine the natural canal uniting the two river systems. In these deserted jungles the only instruments ever seen had been carried by the boundary commissioners. The Portuguese Government agents could not conceive how a sensible man could exhaust himself 'measuring lands that did not belong to him'. Orders had been issued to arrest me, seize my instruments, and especially my astronomical observations, so dangerous to the safety of the State. We were to be led along the Amazon to Grand Para, and then back to Lisbon. Fortunately, the Lisbon Government instantly ordered that I should not be disturbed but rather encouraged.

If the independent Indians have almost disappeared over the last century in those areas north of the Orinoco, it must not be concluded that fewer Indians exist at present than in the time of the bishop of Chiapas, Bartolomeo de las Casas. I have already proved in my work on Mexico how mistaken it is to assume the destruction and diminution of Indians in the Spanish colonies, as Ulloa has written 'Es cosa constante irse disminuyendo por todas partes el numero de los Indios' (There is everywhere a constant decrease in the number of Indians). There are still more than 6 million copper-colored races in both Americas, and though countless tribes and languages have died out it is beyond discussion that within the Tropics, where civilization arrived with Columbus, the number of Indians has considerably increased. (61)