her Majesty's greatness, her justice, her charity to all oppressed
nations, with as many of the rest of her beauties and virtues as either
I could express or they conceive. All which being with great admiration
attentively heard and marvellously admired, I began to sound the old man
as touching Guiana and the state thereof, what sort of commonwealth it
was, how governed, of what strength and policy, how far it extended,
and what nations were friends or enemies adjoining, and finally of the
distance, and way to enter the same. He told me that himself and his
people, with all those down the river towards the sea, as far as
Emeria, the province of Carapana, were of Guiana, but that they called
themselves Orenoqueponi, and that all the nations between the river and
those mountains in sight, called Wacarima, were of the same cast and
appellation; and that on the other side of those mountains of Wacarima
there was a large plain (which after I discovered in my return) called
the valley of Amariocapana. In all that valley the people were also of
the ancient Guianians.

I asked what nations those were which inhabited on the further side of
those mountains, beyond the valley of Amariocapana. He answered with a
great sigh (as a man which had inward feeling of the loss of his country
and liberty, especially for that his eldest son was slain in a battle
on that side of the mountains, whom he most entirely loved) that he
remembered in his father's lifetime, when he was very old and himself
a young man, that there came down into that large valley of Guiana a
nation from so far off as the sun slept (for such were his own words),
with so great a multitude as they could not be numbered nor resisted,
and that they wore large coats, and hats of crimson colour, which
colour he expressed by shewing a piece of red wood wherewith my tent was
supported, and that they were called Orejones and Epuremei; that those
had slain and rooted out so many of the ancient people as there were