154 TUE CATARACT OF THE GUAHIBOS. 



lena the Indians often invited the travellers to stretch 

 themselves on ox-skins, near the church, in the middle 

 of the great square, where they had assembled all the 

 cows in the neighbourhood. The proximity of cattle 

 gives some repose to man. The Indians of the Upper 

 Orinoco and the Cassiquiare, seeing that Bonpland could 

 not prepare his herbal, owing to the continual torment 

 of the mosquitos, invited him to enter their ovens. Thus 

 they called the little chambers, without doors or win- 

 dows, into which they crept horizontally through a very 

 low opening. When they had driven away the insects 

 by means of a fire of wet brushwood, which emitted a 

 great deal of smoke, they closed the opening of the oven. 

 The absence of the mosquitos was purchased dearly 

 enough by the excessive heat of the stagnated air, and 

 the smoke of a torch of copal, which lighted the oven 

 during their stay in it. Bonpland, with courage and 

 patience well worthy of praise, dried hundreds of plants, 

 shut up in these ovens of the Indians. 



They embarked on the morning of the 17th of April. 

 On the 18th they stopped at the mouth of the Rio Tomo. 

 The Indians went on shore, to prepare their food, and 

 take some repose. Wlien the travellers reached the foot 

 of the Cataract of the Guahibos it was near five in the 

 afternoon. It was extremely difficult to go up the cur- 

 rent against a mass of water, precipitated from a bank of 

 gneiss several feet high. An Indian threw himself into 

 the water, to reach, by swimming, the rock that di voided 

 the cataract into two parts. A rope was fastened to the 

 point of this rock, and when the canoe was hauled near 

 enough, their instruments, their dry plants, and the pro- 

 vision they had collected at Atures, were landed in the 



