Beyond the Great Cataracts of the Orinoco an unknown land begins.
It is partly mountainous, receiving at once the confluents of the
Amazon and the Orinoco. We found but three Christian establishments
above the Great Cataracts, along the shore of the Orinoco, in an
extent of more than a hundred leagues; and these three establishments
contained scarcely six or eight white persons, that is to say,
persons of European race. We cannot be surprised that such a desert
region should have been at all times the land of fable and fairy
visions. There, according to the statements of certain missionaries,
are found races of men, some of whom have eyes in the centre of
the forehead, while others have dogs’ heads, and mouths below the
stomachs. There they pretend to have found all that the ancients
relate of the Garamantes, of the Arimaspes, and of the Hyperboreans.
It would be an error to suppose that these simple and often rustic
missionaries had themselves invented all these exaggerated fictions;
they derived them in great part from the recitals of the Indians. A
fondness for narration prevails in the missions, as it does at sea,
in the East, and in every place where the mind seeks amusement. A
missionary, from his vocation, is not inclined to scepticism; he
imprints on his memory what the natives have so often repeated to
him, and when returned to Europe and restored to the civilized world
he finds a pleasure in creating astonishment by a recital of facts
which he thinks he has collected, and by animated description of
remote things. These stories, which the Spanish colonists call “tales
of travellers and of monks,” increase in improbability in proportion
as you increase your distance from the forests of the Orinoco, and
approach the coasts inhabited by the whites. When at Cumana, Nueva
Barcelona, and other seaports which have frequent communication with
the missions, if you betray any sign of incredulity, you are reduced
to silence by these few words: “The fathers have seen it, but far
above the Great Cataracts.”