As soon as you enter the basin of the Atabapo river everything changes: the air, the color of the water, the shape of the river-side trees. By day you no longer suffer the torment of mosquitoes; and their long-legged cousins the zancudos become rare at night. Beyond the San Fernando mission these nocturnal insects disappear altogether. The Orinoco waters are turbid, full of earthy matter, and in the coves give off a faint musky smell from the amount of dead crocodiles and other putrefying animals. To drink that water we had to filter it through a linen cloth. The waters of the Atabapo, on the other hand, are pure, taste good, are without smell, and appear brownish in reflected light and yellow under the sun.

It is thought that some of the plants that grow on the rocky islands of Lake Valencia are exclusive to them because they have not been discovered elsewhere. Among these are the papaw tree of the lake (papaya de la laguna), and a tomato (81) from Cura Island; this differs from our Solanum lycopersicum in that its fruit is round and small but very tasty. The papaw of the lake is common also on Cura Island and at Cabo Blanco. Its trunk is slenderer than the ordinary papaw, but its fruit is half the size and completely round, without projecting ribs. This fruit, which I have often eaten, is extremely sweet.

On feast days, after celebrating mass, the whole community assembles in front of the church. Young girls leave bundles of firewood, maize, bananas and other foodstuff at the missionary's feet. At the same time the governor, mayor and other municipal officers, all pure Indians, exhort the Indians to work, arrange who will do what, scold the lazy and, it has to be said, cruelly beat those who refuse to obey. These strokes are received with the same impassivity with which they are given. These acts of justice last a long time and are frequently seen by any traveler who crosses the llanos. It would be better if the priest did not impose corporal punishment as soon as he left the altar; he should not witness the punishment of men and women in his priestly robes; but his abuse arises from the bizarre principles on which missions are based. The most arbitrary civil powers are tightly linked to the rights exercised by priests; yet, though the Caribs are not cannibals, and you would like them to be treated gently, you do realize that some violence is necessary to maintain order in a new society.

Towards evening we reached the Guanaguana mission, situated at about the same height as the village of San Antonio. We really had to dry ourselves. The missionary received us very cordially. He was an old man who seemed to govern the Indians intelligently. The village has been in this place for only thirty years - before it lay more to the south, against a hill. It is astonishing how easily Indian villages are moved about. In South America there are villages that in less than fifty years have changed places three times. Indians feel bound to the land with such weak ties that they indifferently accept orders to demolish their houses and build them again elsewhere. A village changes its site like a military camp. As long as there are clay, reeds, palm tree and heliconia leaves around they finish rebuilding their huts in a few days. These compulsory changes often have no other motive than the whim of a missionary who, recently arrived from Spain, fancies that the site of the mission is feverish, or not sufficiently exposed to the wind. Whole villages have been transported several leagues just because a monk did not like the view from his house.

On the 1st of July we came across the wreck of a sunken ship. We could distinguish its mast covered in floating seaweed. In a zone where the sea is perpetually calm the boat could not have sunk. Perhaps its remains came from the northerly stormy area and were dragged there by the extraordinary whirling of the Atlantic Ocean in the Southern hemisphere.

April 17th. After walking for three hours we reached our boat at about eleven in the morning. Father Zea packed provisions of clumps of bananas, cassava and chicken with our instruments. We found the river free of shoals, and after a few hours had passed the Garcita raudal whose rapids are easily crossed during high water. We were struck by a succession of great holes, more than 180 feet above the present water-level, that appeared to have been caused by water erosion. The night was clear and beautiful but the plague of mosquitoes near the ground was such that I was unable to record the level of the artificial horizon and lost the opportunity of observing the stars.

The town of Cumana, capital of New Andalusia, lies a mile from the landing-stage or the boca battery where we stepped ashore after crossing the bar of the Manzanares river. We had to traverse a vast plain (el salado) between the Guaiqueri dwellings and the coast. The reverberation from the parched land increased the intense heat. The thermometer, plunged into the white sand, reached 37.7'C. The first plant we gathered from American soil was the Avicennia tomentosa (Mangle prieto), which scarcely reaches 2 feet high here. This shrub, with the sesuvium, the yellow gomphrena and the cacti, covered a ground saturated with soda salts; they belong to the scant social plants like European heaths, and in the torrid zone thrive only on the seashore and high in the Andean plateaux.