’Young Guacharos have been sent to the port or Cumana, and lived there several days without taking any nourishment, the seeds offered to them not suiting their taste.  When the crops and gizzards of the young birds are opened in the cavern, they are found to contain all sorts of hard and dry fruits, which furnish, under the singular name of Guacharo seed (semilla del Guacharo), a very celebrated remedy against intermittent fevers.  The old birds carry these seeds to their young.  They are carefully collected and sent to the sick at Cariaco, and other places of the low regions, where fevers are prevalent. . . .

’The natives connect mystic ideas with this cave, inhabited by nocturnal birds; they believe that the souls of their ancestors sojourn in the deep recesses of the cavern.  “Man,” say they, “should avoid places which are enlightened neither by the sun” (Zis) “nor by the moon” (Nuna).  To go and join the Guacharos is to rejoin their fathers, is to die.  The magicians (piaches) and the poisoners (imorons) perform their nocturnal tricks at the entrance of the cavern, to conjure the chief of the evil spirits (ivorokiamo).  Thus in every climate the first fictions of nations resemble each other, those especially which relate to two principles governing the world, the abode of souls after death, the happiness of the virtuous, and the punishment of the guilty.  The most different and barbarous languages present a certain number of images which are the same, because they have their source in the nature of our intellect and our sensations.  Darkness is everywhere connected with the idea of death.  The Grotto of Caripe is the Tartarus of the Greeks; and the Guacharos, which hover over the rivulet, uttering plaintive cries, remind us of the Stygian birds. . . .

’The missionaries, with all their authority, could not prevail on the Indians to penetrate farther into the cavern.  As the vault grew lower, the cries of the Guacharos became more shrill.  We were obliged to yield to the pusillanimity of our guides, and trace back our steps.  The appearance of the cavern was indeed very uniform.  We find that a bishop of St. Thomas of Guiana had gone farther than ourselves.  He had measured nearly two thousand five hundred feet from the mouth to the spot where he stopped, though the cavern reached farther.  The remembrance or this fact was preserved in the convent of Caripe, without the exact period being noted.  The bishop had provided himself with great torches of white wax of Castille.  We had torches composed only of the bark of trees and native resin.  The thick smoke which issues from these torches, in a narrow subterranean passage, hurts the eyes and obstructs the respiration.