In his third voyage, when for the first time he reached the main land, he was persuaded not only that he had arrived at the extremity of Asia, but that he could not be far from the position of paradise. The Orinoco seemed to be one of those four great rivers which, according to tradition, came out of the garden inhabited by our first parents, and his hopes were supported by the fragrant breezes that blew from the beautiful forests on its banks. This, he thought, was but the entrance to the celestial dwelling-place, and if he had dared--if a religious fear had not held back him who had risked everything amidst the elements and amongst men, he would have liked to push forward to where he might hope to find the celestial boundaries of the world, and, a little further, to have bathed his eyes, with profound humility, in the light of the flaming swords which were wielded by two seraphim before the gate of Eden. He thus expresses himself on this subject in his letter to one of the monarchs of Spain, dated Hayti, October, 1498. "The Holy Scriptures attest that the Lord created paradise, and placed in it the tree of life, and made the four great rivers of the earth to pass out of it, the Ganges of India, the Tigris, the Euphrates (passing from the mountains to form Mesopotamia, and ending in Persia), and the Nile, which rises in Ethiopia and goes to the Sea of Alexander. I cannot, nor have been ever able to find in the books of the Latins or Greeks anything authentic on the site of this terrestrial paradise, nor do I see anything more certain in the maps of the world. Some place it at the source of the Nile, in Ethiopia; but the travellers who have passed through those countries have not found either in the mildness of the climate or in the elevation of the site towards heaven anything that could lead to the presumption that paradise was there, and that the waters of the Deluge were unable to reach it or cover it. Several pagans have written for the purpose of proving it was in the Fortunate Isles, which are the Canaries. St. Isidore, Bede, and Strabo, St. Ambrosius, Scotus, and all judicious theologians affirm with one accord that paradise was in the East. It is from thence only that the enormous quantity of water can come, seeing that the course of the rivers is extremely long; and these waters (of paradise) arrive here, where I am, and form a lake. There are great signs here of the neighbourhood of the terrestrial paradise, for the site is entirely conformable to the opinion of the saints and judicious theologians. The climate is of admirable mildness. I believe that if I passed beneath the equinoctial line, and arrived at the highest point of which I have spoken, I should find a milder temperature, and a change in the stars and the waters; not that I believe that the point where the greatest height is situated is navigable, or even that there is water there, or that one could reach