296 A NOCTURNAL JOTTENET. 



These torches are tubes made of bark, three inches in 

 diameter, and filled with copai resin. "We walked at first 

 over beds of rock, which were bare and slippery, and then 

 we entered a thick grove of palm trees. We were twice 

 obliged to pass a stream on trunks of trees hewn down. 

 The torches had already ceased to give light. Being formed 

 on a strange principle, the woody substance which resembles 

 the wick surrounding the resin, they emit more smoke 

 than light, and are easily extinguished. The Indian pilot, 

 who expressed himself with some facility in Spanish, told us 

 of snakes, water-serpents, and tigers, by which we might" be 

 attacked. Such conversations may be expected as matters 

 of course, by persons who travel at night with the natives. 

 By intimidating the European traveller, the Indians imagine 

 they render themselves more necessary, and gain the con- 

 fidence of the stranger. The rudest inhabitant of the 

 missions fully understands the deceptions which everywhere 

 arise from the relations between men of unequal fortune 

 and civilization. Under the absolute and sometimes vexa- 

 tious government of the monks, the Indian seeks to ame- 

 liorate his condition by those little artifices which are the 

 weapons of physical and intellectual weakness. 



Having arrived during the night at San Jose de Maypures 

 we were forcibly struck by the solitude of the place ; the 

 Indians were plunged in profound sleep, and nothing was 

 heard but the cries of nocturnal birds, and the distant sound 

 of the cataract. In the calm of the night, amid the deep 

 repose of nature, the monotonous sound of a fall of water 

 has in it something sad and solemn. We remained three 

 days at Maypures, a small village founded by Don Jose 

 Solano at the time of the expedition of the boundaries, the 

 situation of which is more picturesque, it might be said still 

 more admirable, than that of Atures. 



The raudal of Maypures, called by the Indians Quituna, 

 is formed, as all cataracts are, by the resistance which the 

 river encounters in its way across a ridge of rocks, or a 

 chain of mountains. The lofty mountains of Cunavami and 

 Calitannni, between the sources of the rivers Cataniapo and 

 Ventuari, stretch toward the west in a chain of granitic 

 hills. From this chain flow three small rivers, which em- 

 brace in some sort the cataract of Maypures. There arc, on 



