296 
A KOCTUENAL JOTJBNEY. 
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 ua 
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 J ose de May pure* 
we were forcibly struck by the solitude of the place ; t e 
Indians were plunged in profound sleep, and nothing was 
heard but the cries of nocturnal birds, and the distant soun 
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. AVe remained three 
days at Maypures, a small village founded by Don Jose 
Solano at the time of the expedition of the boundaries, toe 
situation of which is more mcturesque, it might be said stm 
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 o 
,.Vinin of mountains. The lofty mountains of Cunavami ana 
Calitamini, between the sources of the rivers Cataniapo an 
Yentuari, stretch toward the west in a chain of graniti 
hills. Erom this chain flow three small rivers, which em- 
brace in some sort the cataract of Maypures. There are, ° 
