-3- 
Th« current was steady and slow, farth r back interrupted by 
& couple of minor cataracts* The frames wore glorious but their 
vegetation almost impenetrable. I followed the river 7 kilometers 
without finding the source. 
Stien we came back we found that tee high water had separated us 
fro® the river bed. There was nothing else to do than to try to reach 
it by swimming past the salient mountains. 
San Jose, at present completely uninhabited, could easily feed 
a population of 10,000 people and has all the potentialities for pro¬ 
viding on® of the most attractive living places one could find in the 
tropics. It certainly deserves the name M L& ~erla de Las Perlas". 
Its abundance of expensive sorts of wood as mahagony for 
instance, offers the settlers an opportunity for making a good income, 
and according to an old tradition from the Spanish period many of tee 
rivers carry gold. 
s 
