468 
GEO GRAPHICAL EKKOKS. 
merable swarms of ants during the navigation of the Car si- 
quiare ; and the toldo, or roof of palm-leaves, beneath which 
we were again doomed to remain stretched out during 
twenty-two days, was with difficulty cleared of these insects. 
We employed part of the morning in repeating to the 
inhabitants of Esmeralda the questions we had already put 
to them, respecting the existence of a lake towards the 
east. We showed copies of the maps of Surville and La 
Cruz to old soldiers, who had been posted in the mission 
ever since its first establishment. They laughed at the 
supposed communication of the Orinoco with the Itio 
Idapa, and at the ‘ White Sea,’ which the former river was 
represented to cross. What we politely call geographical 
fictions they termed “ lies of the old world ” (mentiras de 
por alia). These good people could not comprehend how 
men, in making the map of a country which they had never 
visited, could pretend to know things in minute detail, of 
which persons who lived on the spot were ignorant. The 
lake Parima, the Sierra Mey, and the springs which separate 
at the point where they issue from the earth, were entirely 
unknown at Esmeralda. We were repeatedly assured that 
no one had ever been to the east of the Eaudal of the 
Guaharibos ; and that beyond that point, according to the 
opinion of some of the natives, the Orinoco descends like a 
small torrent from a group of mountains, inhabited by the 
Coroto Indians. Father Gili, who was living on the banks 
of the Orinoco when the expedition of the boundaries 
arrived, says expressly, “ that Don Apollinario Diez was 
sent in 1765 to attempt the discovery of the source of the 
Orinoco ; that he found the river, east of Esmeralda, full of 
shoals ; that he returned for want of provision ; and that he 
learned nothing, absolutely nothing, of the existence of a 
lake.” This statement perfectly accords with what I heard 
myself thirty-five years later at Esmeralda. The probability 
of a fact is powerfully shaken when it can be proved to be 
totally unknown on the very spot where it ought to be 
known best; and when those by whom the existence of the 
lake is affirmed contradict each other, not in the least 
essential circumstances, but in all that are the most ini* 
portant. 
