Note 19 — Chapter IV · IN MID-ORINOQUIA

Padre Gilli, a learned missionary, who spent more than eighteen years in the Orinoco region, thus writes of the great river in his informing Saggio de Storia Americana, “One cannot understand how the external appearance of the Orinoco remains practically uniform, except near its source, whether the waters of other rivers are or are not added to it.”19 Depons tells us that the inhabitants attribute to the waters of the Orinoco “many medical virtues, and affirm that they possess the power of dispelling wens and such like tumors.”20 As for ourselves, we made no experiments in this direction. We found the water so muddy from the delta to the Meta, that if a tumbler full of it were set aside for a while, the bottom of the glass became covered with quite a thick layer of yellow sediment. We did not find it to possess the offensive, disgusting odor, due to dead crocodiles, turtles and manatees of which many travelers have complained, but we did take good care never to drink any of it without having it carefully filtered.