CHAPTER XXII

THE TRACKLESS LLANOS OF VENEZUELA

Men have been known to make their way directly from British Guiana to

Venezuela; but the effects of the World War were widespread and only by

taking an ocean liner to Trinidad and transferring to an Orinoco

river-steamer could I begin the next and last stage of my South American

journey, a tramp across the Land of Bolívar—and Castro. By an

extraordinary stroke of luck the _Apure_ of the “Compañia Venezolana

Costeira y Fluvial” was returning that very day, after a month of

repairs in Port-of-Spain, to her regular run on the upper Orinoco, so

that in less time than it takes properly to fulfill the protracted

consular formalities required of those entering Venezuela I was on my

way as the only passenger across the Bocas in just such a frail,

two-story, side-wheel craft as that by which Hays and I had crawled up

the Magdalena into South America three years before.

There was little new along the lower Orinoco to one who had seen every

large river of the continent. Here and there a canoe paddled by naked

Indians nearly as light as a sunburned white man crept along the lower

fringe of one or the other mighty forest wall. A few huts, mostly

abandoned, on the right-hand bank we almost constantly hugged, with now

and then a cornfield chopped out of the forest, were the only other

evidences of humanity. Where we stopped for firewood, groups of Indian

men and women, some of them wearing clothes and all of them showing in

their degenerate, vicious faces evidence of having made the acquaintance

of what we proudly call civilization, lounged in the edge of the jungle

watching our slightest movements. Their huts were only four poles

holding up a thatch roof, but every person had his own hammock, covered

by a _mosquitero_ reaching to the ground. Gradually hills closed in on

us, low, thickly wooded, with great granite outcroppings. Two old yellow

forts appeared, the one on the higher hill already a ruin, the other

flying the yellow, blue, and red flag of Venezuela, with quite a village

of huts below it for the half-Indian soldiers in khaki and their

slattern women. These “Castillos de Guayana” were built by the Spaniards

to protect the entrance to the Orinoco, and it is mainly pride which

causes their feebler descendants to keep up the fiction. For the

authority of Caracas is little more than theoretical in that half of

Venezuela called Guayana which lay hidden in densest wilderness on our

left.

As we neared Ciudad Bolívar, white-winged boats more comfortable than

the wall-less dwellings along shore, each with a huge number painted on

its sails, came down the light-brown river among the small floating

islands it had torn off far above. The typically “Spig” city lay piled

up over a knoll on the southern bank, scattered portions of it spilling

over the rolling and marshy country roundabout. A few feet from shore we

were ordered to halt and await a “visit,” and it was hours later that

the languid, futile formalities were ended. The chief excitement in town

was “the dike,” a great wall built to keep back the water from the

flooded campos, now leaking until the great lagoon which always forms at

the foot of the town during the rainy season was driving out the

dwellers in the lower fringe of huts. Half the city had come out to see

prisoners from the _cárcel_, under even more evil-eyed soldiers from the

_cuartel_, strive to stop the leaks by letting cowhides over the side of

the wall and tamping apathetically here and there with their clumsy

tools. But it is the Venezuelan custom for jailers to steal most of the

rations to which their charges are entitled, and the prisoners were in

no condition to accomplish their task, even had they had any incentive

to do so. I was startled to hear a voice behind me say, “I fear we all

go’n’ get de wash-out, sah.”

At least it gave one a sense of not being entirely cut off from the more

orderly world to hear English-speaking negroes in the streets of Ciudad

Bolívar, and their presence made other foreigners less subject to

constant open-mouthed scrutiny. Hackmen, chauffeurs, nurse-girls, and

servants in general were commonly Guianese or West Indian negroes, so

that my native tongue often sounded in my ears. The rest of the

population was that of almost all Spanish-American cities,—few pure

whites and fewer full Indians, but every possible mixture of the two,

with a goodly dash of African blood thrown in to complete the

catastrophe.

Whatever beauty Ciudad Bolívar has is indoors. No green lawns or

flower-gardens cheer the eye of the passer-by, though now and then a

glimpse through a doorway along the deadly line of dirty stucco walls

reveals a patio filled with blossoms and tropical shrubbery, with

perhaps a fountain. Even inside is no patch of Eden. Parrots, as well as

all domestic fowls, contest the average patio with dogs, pigs, naked

urchins, and adults. It is in conformity with his other cruelties to

dumb brutes, his total lack of compassion, that the keeping of caged

animals is an inherent trait of the South American. Back of the city

lies an extensive swamp from which come great numbers of mosquitoes, the

same swamp that the people were struggling so energetically to have

their jailbirds hold in check. It is often hot by day, but at night a

cool breeze sweeps in from the broad Orinoco and the town casts off its

torpor. Lights spring up, gaudily dressed and heavily powdered women

lean on their elbows behind the heavy wooden window-bars, the band plays

along the waterfront Alameda, the streets are filled with a roving crowd

of carnal-minded men and boys, and Ciudad Bolívar seems for a space

almost a wide-awake city.

The Venezuelans refused to take my proposed walk across the country

seriously, so that it was doubly difficult to get trustworthy

information. The llanos were said to be flooded at that season, and the

overland journey to Caracas was reputed to be 180 leagues, a mere 540

miles! I dared not send myself forth on any such unnecessary stroll as

that, for I had solemnly sworn to be home at all costs within four years

of my departure, and it was already the end of July. But at least I

could tramp straight across to the Atlantic, and find swifter means of

transportation to La Guayra and Caracas. There were worse stories of the

dangers of a lone “gringo” wandering through Venezuela than in any other

South American country. Revolutionists had for months infested the very

territory in which I proposed to risk my life—but I remembered the tale

of the Venezuelan colonel sent with his regiment to wage battle over the

range, who came hurrying back at the head of his troops, to report, “My

general, just over the summit we met two drunken Americans, and they

would not let us pass!” Besides, the war in Europe had made it difficult

for bandits and revolutionists to get arms and ammunition. “But at

least,” cried the natives, “you must have a mule and a saddle!” and a

kind man offered to sell me such an outfit, “all ready to mount”—for a

thousand _bolívares_! True, a _bolívar_ is no more than a franc, but a

thousand of them was more than I was depending upon to set me down in

one of our north central states.

[Illustration: An Indian family at eastern Venezuela]

[Illustration: Lopez, the hammock-buyer, and the charm he always wears

on his travels]

[Illustration: A Venezuelan landscape]

I was reduced, therefore, to my usual common denominator,—engaging my

own instincts as guide and hiring my own feet to carry myself and my

belongings. A certain reduction of the latter was imperative. The most

effective accomplishment in that respect was the trading of my heavy

Ceará hammock—though it was like dismissing an old friend, for I had

slept in it since long before Carlos died—for one made of _curagua_ by

the Indians of the Orinoco. This was a mere grass net, being woven of

the fibrous leaf of a small wild plant related to the pineapple; but it

weighed only forty ounces, ropes and all, and is capable of holding me

comfortably in its lap to this day. As I was taking leave of the

native-born American consul, my attention was drawn to great blocks of

yellowish stuff in his warehouse that were sewed up in sacking and

stenciled for shipment to the United States. It turned out to be chicle,

the milky juice of the _sapodilla_ tree, which flourishes along the

Orinoco, boiled down and dried for use in the one land that appreciates

so doubtful a luxury. The consul gave me a piece, very light in weight

and of the size of my fist, and the wisest thing I did in Venezuela was

not to throw it away—not simply because it was pure chewing-gum, lacking

only the sweetish flavor, but because it saved me many a thirsty hour in

my tramp across the arid country.

The Orinoco sweeps swiftly past Ciudad Bolívar, formerly called

Angostura—the “Narrows”—a big rounded rock breasting the current in

midstream. I crossed it in one of the little sailboats with numbered

sails, speeding along before a stiff breeze that seemed to whip us

swiftly forward, until a glance at the shores showed that we were really

moving backward downstream, so swift was the current. Only gradually did

we make the opposite bank, and it took nearly an hour to pole our way

back to Soledad, just across from where we had started. One could

scarcely blame this hamlet, justly named Solitude, if it looked

unwashed; only the day before a boy of twelve had stepped into the river

for a bath and an alligator had walked off with him for its Sunday

dinner. Still, the place had children to spare. Staggering ashore under

my bagful of assorted junk, I at once struck out along the “camino

real,” a mere trail which first climbed to a slight plateau with a view

back on Ciudad Bolívar, then broke into thinly scrub-wooded pampa or

sandy llanos covered with tuft-grass as far as the eye could see. As the

“royal road” showed a constant tendency to split up into many paths that

lost themselves in the heavy grass, I had to trust mainly to compass and

instinct. At noon I stopped at a mud-hole fringed with cattle-tracks to

eat a square yard of cassava-bread washed down with handfuls of muddy

water. The sweat poured off me in streams under my big, awkward burden,

and it soon became apparent that I must still further reduce my load.

Then and there I gave my leather leggings to a passing half-Indian

horseman, who, to prove his aboriginal blood, did not so much as thank

me. Three Indians in hats, loin-cloths and pieces of jackets, with an

old rifle each, loping noiselessly past, aroused my envy.

The sun was still troublesome when I came to a miserable village of half

a dozen mud-and-thatch ruins, before which ragged men sat in deep

silence, now and then heaving a long sigh and relapsing again into

silence. I coaxed one of them to row me across the La Piña River, and

plodded on. What time it was when I reached a ranch called “El Orticero”

I cannot say, for the crystal and minute-hand of my aged tin watch had

succumbed to the day’s struggle, and the rest of the contraption

functioned only intermittently. I pressed it upon my old but artless

host, and a chicken died in consequence. But the fowl was evidently both

young and slender, for the entire dinner consisted of a thin soup with a

few scraps of chicken in it and a bowl of milk. No wonder these people

have no energy; this to them was a gala meal.

The considerable wait from dawn to sunrise was scarcely worth the small

cup of black coffee, or rather, _guarapo_, which the brewing of last

night’s coffee grounds yielded. Passing the cow-yard as I set out,

however, I got a bowl of foaming milk with which to wash down another

shaving of cassava. In the middle of the morning a strong fever came

upon me, forcing me to lie down in scrubby shade on the sand and

tuft-grass for an hour or more. When I could endure my raging thirst no

longer, I crawled to my feet and stumbled on across the blazing, choking

semi-desert in a for a long time vain quest for water. At last I came

upon a red-hot sandy bed, along which crawled a stream half an inch deep

where I scooped out a hole and, when it had somewhat cleared, inhaled in

one breath a good quart of the lukewarm water. A reasonable man,

recognizing the trip I had laid out for myself as a mere “stunt,” would

have given up and returned to Ciudad Bolívar and Trinidad; but I was

born bull-headed. I staggered on, and at length sighted a countryman’s

thatched hut—an _hato_, they call it in Venezuela—where I was welcomed

with bucolic but genuine hospitality and motioned to a seat on a

whitened horse-skull. I swung my hammock instead. When this had reduced

my weariness, I took up the imperative question of doing the same for my

pack, absolutely refusing to stagger farther under such a load in such a

climate. I threw aside my heavy shoes, thereby taking the weight of the

low city ones off my shoulders, following them with a pair of wintry

trousers and a workingman’s shirt I had seldom worn. The shoes and

several odds and ends I bequeathed to the woman of the _hato_, for her

absent husband; the trousers and shirt went to a visiting neighbor, who

promised to guide me in the morning to the next hamlet. I threw away the

tin cans that protected my exposed kodak films, all but the quinine I

should need for the next fortnight, almost all my other medicines,

two-thirds of my soap, most of my ink in the bottle I had carried from

Quito, and I even cut in two my tube of dental paste. The woman and her

visitor accepted all these things with labial thanks, but my strongest

hints produced nothing to appease my appetite. The sun was casting its

rays in upon me under the thatch roof before we sat down before a little

plate of fried mango, a kind of armadillo stew, and little bowls of

coffee—well enough, but just one-tenth as much as I could have eaten

myself.

“_Por aquí son la gente muy amigos al interés_,” said my ungrammatical

guide, when the woman was out of hearing; “Here people are friends of

their own interest. If you had no money to buy food, or if you had not

given her all those fine things, you would not even have got this, but

might have starved before her eyes.”

The truth is that the country people of Venezuela have almost nothing to

eat themselves, much less anything to share. They have not the energy to

grow much of anything, no one has the energy to bring things to sell

from town; and under such a blistering sun I do not know that I blame

them. More disheartening still is the government of unenlightened

tyrants under which they live. This woman and her husband—their story is

typical of thousands—once had more than a hundred head of cattle, and

other possessions in proportion. Came Castro with his fellow-rascals and

stole or ate the whole herd. One has little inspiration to pile up

possessions by rude labor under a tropical sun for the advantage of the

next passing band of ruffians. These poor, sequestered people in their

tucked away _hatos_ were typical of all the campo, with its stories of

oppression, tyranny, treachery, and stark brutality, all told in a

gentle, uncomplaining voice and manner, avoiding any direct reference to

the chief tyrant, as if even the palm-trees had ears, and replying to

all pertinent questions with that helpless, hopeless, irresponsible,

non-committal “_Quién sabe?_”

Somewhat reduced in load, though still overburdened, I set out again

next morning. A tiny cup of black coffee was what I was expected to

start on, but I managed to beg two half-ripe mangos. In my light shoes

and reduced pack I spun along splendidly—so long as I had any road to

spin on. Just there was the rub. Don Augustín, the _hato_ visitor, had

left with me, carrying the shirt and trousers I had given him to guide

me to the next hamlet. But when, some four or five miles on, we had come

upon an Indian hut and bought two _patillas_, a kind of watermelon, for

ten cents, he announced that he was going a league westward to his own

house to get his hammock, and that I was to go “straight ahead” along

the road he pointed out, until he caught up with me. Both he and the

“Caribes,” as Venezuela calls the aborigines of this region, assured me

that I could not possibly go astray—yet I had not covered two hundred

yards of that sandy, coarse-grassed pampa before another “road” led off,

just such a narrow path as the one I was on. Then came fork after fork

in swift succession, until I was involved in a network, an absolute

labyrinth of trails, any one of which was as likely to be the “royal

road” as any other. I took one after another, only to have the path

dwindle and fade from under my feet in the high grass and be gone.

Several led to the charred remains of an Indian hut; one finally brought

me out before such a hovel still standing, where half a dozen Indian

women, all but stark naked, squatted and lolled on the earth floor,

three of them suckling cadaverous and filthy brats, and all languidly

engaged in scratching their leathery bare skins. They spoke little or no

Spanish, but seemed to imply that I should take a road down into a

valley. I took it, lost it, again found pieces of it, or some other

path, lost those, brought up in a stream that soaked me to the thighs,

and seeing worse ahead, as well as evidence that this was not the right

direction, I scrambled my way back to the Indian women. But they were

just as naked and ignorant as ever. I gave up, though it was still

morning and I was anxious to push on, and swung my hammock under a roof

on poles beside such road as there was, got into pajamas so that I could

spread my dripping garments in the sun, snatching them in again for

several light showers and hoped against hope that some one with human

intelligence would come along and give me information.

Hope having died and my clothing being nearly dry, I harnessed up again

and went back once more to the Indian hut. This time the man was there.

He gave me in fluent Spanish verbose directions concerning a “road”

alleged to lead directly to “El Descanso,” which was close by, without a

chance of my missing it. Simple as his directions sounded to the fellow

himself, I offered him money to take me there; but he replied that he

was a consumptive with fever—and he looked it. Within a quarter of a

mile that “direct” road forked into at least twenty similar paths, every

one of which looked as direct as the others. Catching sight of a hut

down in a valley, I made for it through sticky mud—and found it open and

quite evidently inhabited, but with only a squalling infant in a hammock

within sound of my voice. I waded back to more trails upon trails across

swamps and through tangled undergrowth, saw another hut on a hill,

climbed to it and found it abandoned, saw another across a swampy valley

and struck out for that. This time it was a large house or collection of

houses with solid mud walls, instead of mere reeds, the shaggy thatched

roof “banged” at the doorways, and other signs of affluence and

intelligent information—but every door was padlocked.

There was no use making any more blind guesses. I swung my hammock under

a tree at the gate, where another ass tied to a post was already dozing,

resolved to stay until my luck changed. For what seemed hours I hovered

on the brink of starvation, when there appeared across the rolling,

weed-grown country what looked like a horseman on a mule. Illusion! It

was only a boy on a jackass. He knew nothing of roads, but he did bring

me the information that I was even then at “El Descanso,” the very place

I had been seeking, and that the people who lived there would be back

“soon.” Also he sold me three mangos, but I had not even a knife, and to

rob a mango of its substance with a small pair of scissors and one’s

teeth is as harrowing as not to be able to find a drop of water after

the ordeal is over. Also in such a climate it is a fine fruit for those

who wish to die young. But at least I was passing the most blistering

hours of the day in breezy shade in a spot appropriately named “The

Rest.”

It must have been four o’clock, and for two hours I had been enjoying a

fever, not the burning one of the day before, but the languid kind one

almost luxuriates in so long as one can lie still. Not a sound had there

been in all this time except the lazy sighing of the breeze in the

scattered shrubs and an occasional protest from the other hungry donkey.

Then all at once I heard a woman or a boy shout within twenty feet of

me; but when I sat up and called back there was no answer. I had

wandered twice around the house, and the call had been several times

repeated, before I discovered that it came from the family parrot,

perched on the ridge of the roof. Again and again it hallooed across

hill and swamp, in exactly the tone and voice of a South American

country woman, telling some one in clear, impeccable Spanish to come

home at once, that some one was there, and more to the same effect. At

last an answering voice, and then several came faintly across the

valley, sounding steadily nearer, and finally two girls, one already

married, shuffled up in _alpargatas_ and the shapeless loose calico

dresses of their class. The older one seemed resentful, and the younger

frightened, at sight of a man, even out under their gate-tree, and as I

was just then enjoying another wave of fever, I continued to wait,

hoping they would be followed by some one of my own sex. When it began

to grow dark, however, I went to ask the older girl if she could cook me

something. No, there was not a mouthful of anything in the house. Well,

how much for a chicken? Forty cents. I gave it, and lay in my hammock

for another interminable hour. Then she came to ask if cheese would not

do! I told her in a voice one does not customarily use to ladies that I

had paid for chicken, and she shuffled away again; and long after dark

she brought the cooked fowl intact, broth and all, with a bowl of goat’s

milk. But by this time fever had routed my appetite and I could not

drink more than half the broth and a bit of milk, so I wrapped the

chicken in a paper and hung it from a rafter of the empty sheep-pen

without walls, to which I retired rather than keep the timid maidens up

all night by staying in the house.

The girls had no knowledge that roads ever ran anywhere, and were even

more grouchy and uncompassionate the next morning when I wheedled

another bowl of milk and struck off at random. Troubles never come

singly, and when I took down the chicken I looked forward to feasting

upon later in the day I found that a colony of ants had anticipated me,

and there was barely a scrap of meat left. As it was plainly up to me to

get somewhere, I took the first of several trails leading down into the

valley in a general northerly direction. It showed a few burro-tracks

for a way, but gradually split up into ever dwindling paths, all of

which ended sooner or later in _morichales_, those great bog swamps

filled with every difficulty and danger from entangled roots to

alligators, and densely shaded by the _moriche_ palms from which

Venezuela makes her hammocks. It would be easier to get through a stone

wall. At length I tried a path leading almost southwest, determined to

get around the swamp by a flanking movement, but I barely saved myself

from dropping into a sinkhole of quicksands. Back on dry land again, I

kept to the highlands for miles, at times plodding in exactly the

opposite direction from that in which I was bound, now and then wading a

patch of marsh and finally, crossing the stream near its outlet from the

_morichal_, arriving famished at a hut almost within gunshot of “El

Descanso.” Here the family of the boy who had sold me the mangos the day

before was engaged in the favorite Venezuelan occupation of lying in

hammocks, but the woman had more than the racial average of humanity and

intelligence and for the sum of ten cents she placed before me four

fried eggs, than which nothing had tasted better as far back as I could

remember. Then they directed me to San Pedro, and by some strange luck I

managed to keep the right one of the labyrinth of paths across the

deadly still, sandy prairie, with its coarse, uninviting grass and ugly

scrub trees, to a kind of country store, where two tiny stale biscuits

and a mashed-corn loaf, called _arepa_, gave me the strength to push on.

Getting careful directions, I set off for Tabaro, and nothing could have

been easier than to find my way across this flat, hot plain, utterly

waterless, so that all the way to that cluster of huts I subsisted on

three small lemons. But I might have known that this easy going was only

a lull before the storm. They sent a boy a little way from Tabaro to put

me on the right road, “which goes straight, straight, without a chance

to lose your way, and anyway you can follow the tracks of this horse,

which just left for there.” Follow his Satanic Majesty! There is not a

human being, unless he knew it already, who could have distinguished

that path from a hundred and fifty others, of cows, horses, mules, and

everything else that goes on four legs in Venezuela. I took the one that

looked most promising, landed in a _morichal_, pulled off my shoes and

waded for some distance in black mud, tore through more tangled

undergrowth, and found myself only at the beginning of the real

struggle. Removing my trousers in the hope of saving enough of them to

escape arrest if ever I struggled my way back to civilization, I

attacked the swamp and jungle with all the force I had left, cutting my

feet and legs, gashing hands and even my face, sinking to my waist in

the slough, watching the sun rapidly setting on a night that I was not

only doomed to spend out of doors without food, but evidently immersed

in mud and without water to drink. Then all at once I burst out upon the

brink of a large, swift river. I had already heard of it, but was

supposed to come upon it at an _hato_ called “El Cardón” and be set

across in the owner’s canoe. There was no sign of human existence, much

less of a farmhouse, and the river was plainly too swift to swim with my

load, even if it were not full of alligators. Besides, the most

important thing just then was rest, for I was weak from fever and lack

of food.

The red sun sank behind the tree-tops to the east—no, if I could have

gotten my bearings right, I believe it would have proved the west. I

hung my hammock between two scrubs, bathed on the bank of the river,

drank several handfuls of it for supper, and rolled in. To add to the

pleasure of the situation the one book I happened to have with me opened

to a chapter entitled “The English Cuisine!” Being absolutely devoid of

shelter, I had dragged a few fallen _moriche_ leaves together and made a

tiny lean-to beside me under which to shield my scanty possessions. It

was in keeping with my luck in this thirteenth Latin-American country in

which I had traveled that for the first night since I had reached

Venezuela it should rain. I was awakened first by some wild beast nearly

as large as a yearling calf, which dashed out of the undergrowth,

uttered a strange cry at sight of my hammock, and sprang in one leap

directly over me and into the stream with a great splash. I emptied my

revolver after it, but it quickly disappeared. By the time I had hunted

cartridges in the dark and loaded again—for some other heavy animal

seemed to be prowling about in the brush—it began to sprinkle, with

lightning flashes, and then it turned to a real rain. I adopted the

Amazonian means of keeping dry, stripped naked, rolled clothes and

hammock into a bundle I could thrust under the improvised shelter, and

sat down upon the unprotected corner of my stuff and let it rain.

Luckily, it did not continue long, and within half an hour I had rolled

up in my hammock again.

[Illustration: Hammock-makers at home]

[Illustration: The palm-leaf threads of the hammocks are made pliable by

rubbing them on a bare leg in the early morning before the dew has

dried]

[Illustration: Lopez buying hammocks]

[Illustration: We were delighted to find a rare water-hole in which to

quench our raging thirst]

When next I woke, in a breeze so cool that I put on my daytime clothing

over my pajamas, the stars were shining. But this was base deception,

for I was awakened later by a veritable downpour, without even time to

strip, and could only huddle over my belongings and keep as much water

off them as possible. Soon afterward dawn came and the next problem

after getting my wet mess together was to decide whether to go up or

down stream. Nowhere was there a sign that man had ever before been in

those parts. I chose upstream, and quickly plunged again into another

_morichal_, such a jungle and swamp, filled with the odor of rotting

vegetation, as only wild men or lost ones attempt to fight their way

through. Plants with sharks’ teeth, sabre cacti with hook-shaped horns

and needle points along the edge, upright sprays of vegetable bayonets,

grappled and pierced clothes and skin. Through this mass I tore and

waded barefoot for perhaps two hours, by no means certain there was any

end to it; but finally, with legs and feet a patchwork of cuts and

scratches, and my shirt in rags, I came out upon another vast,

tuft-grass and sandy prairie. On these immense scrub-wooded plains,

crisscrossed in every direction by narrow cow-paths, but rarely by human

trails, a man might wander until he choked or starved. I followed one

path several miles until it died a lingering death, then fearful of

losing even water I returned to the river, which here almost doubled

upon itself. I tried another path and had wandered at random for I know

not how long when my eye was caught by a thatched roof an immense

distance away at right angles. I dragged my sore feet—they were so

swollen I could not put on my shoes—for miles through the cutting

prairie grass—only to find an abandoned and ruined hut! I was about to

return to the river in despair when I caught sight of another hovel on a

knoll a mile away. At first this also appeared abandoned, but as there

were several chickens about it, evidently it was inhabited, a fact

verified by finding still warm the ends of fagots over which breakfast

had been cooked. Lifting the woven-grass door of that half of the house

with walls, I found two hammocks and a few simple utensils inside, but

not a sign of anything edible, except the chickens, and I had no

matches. There was not even water, and I had to take a big earthenware

jar down to a swampy stream a quarter of a mile away and carry it back

on my head. Then I swung my hammock, got into pajamas, and hung out

everything to dry, determined to stay there until doomsday rather than

strike out into the foodless unknown wastes again. I slept. A shower

woke me just in time to snatch in my clothes. They had been hung out

once more and I was again asleep when, about midday, I was awakened by a

rustling of the grass door outside which I hung, and looked up to find a

woman of the same dirty, grouchy, uncompassionate type of all those

parts. I asked her where I was, and was delighted to learn, even from so

sour an individual, that I was barely a league distant from the _hato_ I

had been trying to reach. The female was returning there at once, and I

could “follow her footprints.” There was no getting her to wait a minute

while I dressed and packed, and well I knew my ability to lose her

footprints within the first hundred yards. I did just that, and should

have been as badly off as ever, had not a half-negro with two babies

appeared on a horse, followed by his woman and older daughter on foot,

likewise bound for “El Cardón.” We waded two swamps, cutting up what was

left of my feet, and when I stopped within sight of the _hato_ to wash

them in a stream, another sudden shower left me dripping at every pore.

“El Cardón” was a collection of several mud houses in the center of a

large ranch. As usual, the owner was not at home, and the slatternly,

filthy, moralless female in charge seemed to take pleasure in my

condition. Though the place swarmed with chickens and several other

potential forms of food, her stock answer to my repeated offers to pay

well for one was that lie I had so often heard in the Andes—“_Son

ajenos_—they belong to someone else.” “Well, sell me _anything_ to eat,”

I urged, with as much calm dignity as I could muster under the

circumstances.

“I am not the owner,” she invariably replied, “and I cannot.”

She could, of course, for she was in full charge of the establishment,

but these part-Indian people of rural South America probably would enjoy

nothing more than to see a man die of starvation in their noisome

dooryards. It is the same spirit which makes the Spaniard shriek with

delight over a disemboweled horse at his bull-fights. It cost me a

struggle even to get water. Here the man with whom I had arrived took a

hand, and at last he got her to open the main room, the only one that

was not filled with fowls, dogs, babies, and pigs rolling in their own

filth, which soon invaded that also. It was a cement-floored place with

only the thatched roof for ceiling, photographs of the owner and his

relatives in all sorts of unnatural postures and some silly English

lithographs of about 1840 scattered around the half-washed walls.

Finally, at least three hours later, this same man induced the stubborn

female to serve me a dish of beans and rice with some scraps of pork in

it, such as she fed twice daily to the peons.

As the next place was eighteen miles away, by a “road” I was almost

certain to lose, I was stranded until I could by hook or crook get a

guide and food for the journey. I had several times bathed my bleeding

feet and legs in the only disinfectant available, kerosene, which added

to the combined ache of my countless lacerations, while to complete my

superficial misery, swamps, sun, and perspiration had opened anew the

half-healed tropical ulcers and the wound above one elbow where an

English bulldog had bitten me when I had had the audacity to attempt to

deliver a letter of introduction on a sugar estate in British Guiana. At

length a man theoretically in command of the establishment arrived and

after a long argument I was half-promised a guide for mañana—if I would

pay him sixty cents, that is, three days’ wages at the local scale. Then

the woman whose hut I had invaded, returning “donde mí,” as the rural

Venezuelan calls his own house, accepted forty cents for a chicken which

she might or might not send for me to turn over to the unsympathetic

female, who might or might not be induced to cook it. The fowl came,

however, and died at sunset, so that it was long after dark when it

reached me smothered in rice and none too well done, though I had

difficulty in keeping enough of it for the next day’s journey. Another

_capataz_, with as little authority as the other over those supposedly

under his orders, appeared and, with two peons, hung his hammock from

the beams of the family parlor in which I sat. For some two hours they

swung back and forth thrumming rude guitars and singing improvised

couplets. Illiterate and ignorant as they were, they could alternate

unhesitatingly with two-line rhymes on some local subject of the

day—such as myself:

“Y un blanco ha llega-a-a-o

Con los piés maltrata-a-a-o.”

These were almost always spiced with some indecent reference to women,

about such remarks as two stallions might make to each other in a

discussion of mares, if they had speech—no, they would be more

dignified. “_Nosotros somos unos brutos_,” said one of the youths, who

at least had a glimmering of his own ignorance, rare in those parts; but

his use of the word “brute” was not what I would have given it. The

peons came twice after I had retired, posing at least as authorized

go-betweens, to ask whether I wished the unspeakable female to share my

hammock with me, a favor which she frankly took turns in showering upon

all the men above the age of fifteen on the place.

The usual farmyard chorus announced dawn long before it arrived, and

even when it did come I could not strike off alone and unbreakfasted.

But two hours passed before the surly female brought me a cup of black

coffee, and I was about to start alone, whatever the risk, when a negro

named Ambrosio turned up and offered to go with me for forty cents.

Guides are cheap enough, if only you can get them. The female had stolen

more than half the chicken I had left in her charge, leaving me burdened

only with three pieces of it. I overcame Ambrosio’s natural tendency to

put it off until mañana and we struck down across the hot plain to the

river, which we crossed in an old _curial_ attached to a wire stretching

from bank to bank, Ambrosio carrying me ashore on his shoulders—at my

suggestion—to save me the time and trouble of removing and replacing my

shoes. I also bluffed him into carrying the larger part of my bundle.

Luckily, I had not started alone; I certainly should have lost the way

again. So did Ambrosio, for that matter, though like a true

Latin-American his version of it was “se ha perdi’o el camino—the road

has lost itself.” He was an experienced _vaqueano_, however, and

striking across the rolling, loose sand, with some sidestepping he

landed me at noon in La Canoa.

This was a village of several large huts on a one-wire telegraph line,

the principal one being occupied by the part-negro family of the

telegraph operator. Almost a real meal was prepared for me while I swung

in my hammock above the earth floor of the _sala_, or “sitting-room.”

The toothless old lady with whom I whiled away the delay said it was bad

enough to live in a region where one could get nothing to eat, but “the

worst is that when somebody dies, you can’t even buy candles!” I agreed

with her. A wide, main-traveled trail, always within sight of the

telegraph wire, lay before me, but there were twelve miles to be covered

without a drop of water. I had three small green lemons, however, and

set my fastest pace until I reached the clear river near the end of the

journey, halting to drink it half dry before bathing and strolling up to

three miserable huts on a knoll above.

Here a part-Indian youth named Lopez, with two asses and a mulatto boy

assistant, had also stopped for the night on a journey in my direction,

and as there were thirty miles without water ahead, I made myself

_simpático_ in the hope that we might join forces. Neither for love nor

money could anything be bought here, except sugar-cane and miserable

cassava-bread. I consider my digestive apparatus above the average in

enduring hardships, but I felt it was entitled to something better than

cold fried sawdust that evening. This ridiculous notion aroused the

mirth of the natives, who gathered around me prophesying disaster while

I tried the effect of boiling a few sheets of the cassava-bread into a

kind of hot pudding. They were right. The stuff tasted like wet calico

and an hour later I was attacked with the worst case of seasickness I

have ever suffered, which lasted nearly all night, the earlier part of

it gladdened by the natives standing about me doubled up with shrieking

laughter.

[Illustration: Lopez uncovers as he passes the last resting-place of a

fellow-traveler]

[Illustration: Dinner time in rural Venezuela]

[Illustration: Lopez enters his native village in style]

My breakfast consisted of sucking a sugar-cane. These people, though not

exactly savages, have the same improvidence and indolence, not to

mention heartlessness, and are so lazy that they will sit half-starved

or kill themselves early by the rubbish they put into their stomachs,

rather than go out and plant something. They were so lazy that there was

not a drop of water in any one of the three huts until some two hours

after the first complaint of thirst was heard; they live so literally

from hand to mouth that no sooner do they get a bean or a grain of corn

than they eat it raw. Let anything in edible form appear, and there is a

rush of dogs, pigs, chickens, and goats to dispute it with their human

companions; give them meat, and they will sit up all night to cook and

devour it, never beginning their preparations for the next meal until

everything, down to the last water-jar, is empty.

Lopez offered to put my bundle on one of his donkeys, whether in the

hope of running away with it or from kindness mingled with the

expectation of a tip I did not decide until some time afterward. With

half the morning already gone, we were off at last, under a blistering

sun, everything I owned, including my money and proof of identity, on

the burro’s back, except my kodak, revolver, and a small bottle of

water. We had gone a league when Lopez decided to turn aside to the

_hato_ “La Peña,” as far off our line of march, and, still carrying the

bottle of water, I arrived at the same river from which I had dipped it

up and had to shed shoes and trousers to cross it. Here we squatted for

hours in an earth-floored farmhouse belonging to a man who boasted

possession of thousands of acres, yet who dressed in rags and in whose

house there was scarcely a day’s rations. No wonder people living as

they do in rural Venezuela are only too glad to start a revolution, if

only in the hope of perhaps getting something to eat.

About noon I discovered that we were waiting while an ass that was for

sale could be found. Whichever way I guessed on this trip, I was wrong.

I had thought that by joining Lopez my progress would be increased;

already it looked as if quite the opposite were the case. At last the

burro was found; then he must be caught; then he proved _malucho_, which

means almost anything in Venezuela, wild, twisted, wrong, mad, not right

in any way. Then there ensued a long Oriental argument about the price,

which was finally settled at eighty _bolívares_ ($16.17). Next Lopez

must have a document of sale on a sheet out of my note-book and written

with my pen—because there was evidently not another one in the region;

then he must undo his pack and take out money enough in silver to pay

the price, after it had been counted half a dozen times on both sides,

and three times by me as confirmation, and finally, at a fine hour to

start on a twenty-seven mile tramp across a desert without water, food,

or shelter, we were off.

For the first few miles it took the combined exertions of the three of

us to initiate the new donkey, who was young, large, and strong, so that

by the time we were well out of reach of the river again, our tongues

were protruding with thirst. Then we plodded unbrokenly on, hour after

hour across a tinder-dry desert of coarse tuft-grass and scraggly trees,

slightly rolling in great waves, the “road” a dozen untrodden paths

hidden in a grass that tore viciously at our feet. Unless we found a

_pozo_, or hole in the ground, well off the trail at about mid-distance,

by spying an extra insulator on the single telegraph-wire that kept more

or less beside us, we would come upon no water during the whole

twenty-seven miles. I allowed myself two swallows from my bottle at the

end of the first blazing half-hour, and as many at regular intervals

thereafter, having to share my scanty supply with Lopez. With the

typical improvidence of his race he had brought none with him, but being

a true Latin-American, he expected to be protected by those who had

provided themselves. By good luck, rather than for any other reason, we

did catch sight of the white knob on the wire midway between two poles,

and after long search found in the immensity of the desert an irregular

hole in the ground where water is said to be always clear and good. My

bottle filled again, but with my maltreated feet shrinking at every

step, we plodded on toward the next water, fifteen miles away. During

the last five of them I chewed chicle incessantly, and without it would

probably have been capable of drinking the blood of my companions. At

last, with dusk settling down, we sighted a good-sized house on a ridge,

but as this was a telegraph office, Lopez did not wish to approach it,

having the lower-class Venezuelan’s dread of coming into unnecessary

contact with the government in any form.

We hobbled on until dark, when I caught sight of a hut some distance off

the trail and forced my tortured feet to carry me to it. It proved to be

the most miserable human dwelling I had yet seen, inhabited by a

yellow-negro male and female without a possession in the world worth a

dollar. There was not a scrap of anything to eat, no light, and not even

a roof over most of the house. But casually, during the course of the

fixed formalities of greeting, the man mentioned that back at the

“office” where Lopez had refused to stop the weekly steer had just been

killed! It was the first time since leaving Ciudad Bolívar that there

had been a possibility of buying meat. I offered the mulatto a cash

reward to go back and get me two _bolívares_ worth, an offer which he

accepted with what passes in Venezuela for alacrity, first showing me on

the way his “well”—two small holes in the ground on the edge of a

_morichal_. There I sat and poured gallons of water on my aching feet,

at the same time drinking my fill. Hobbling back to the hut, I had the

woman put on the kettle at once, and the water was hot when the man

arrived, strangely enough bringing what was probably the whole forty

cents’ worth—a great slab of beef nearly two feet long. Unnecessary

delay being painful, I myself cut it up and soon had it stewing.

Meanwhile I sent our colored friend to a neighboring hut to buy

_papelón_, which proved to be my old companion _chancaca_, _panela_,

_rapadura_, or crude sugar of solid form, in a new disguise. By the time

he returned I was drinking beef broth, to the astonishment of all

beholders, for these foolish people, who are always on the verge of

starvation and ready to eat the most inedible rubbish, boil their beef

and then throw away the broth! They seem, too, to prefer their miserable

cassava to meat, though in this case the family was still devouring

their share of the feast when I turned in at what must have been near

midnight of a day that I only then recalled had been Sunday.

The most persistent of roosters, a few feet away from me, began his

false report about three and kept it up unbrokenly until daylight really

broke. This time we loaded the big new donkey, but the sun was well up

before we had found and captured the other two. The old canvas cover of

Lopez’ pack showed faintly the words “U. S. Mail,” but this would have

meant nothing to him, even had I called attention to it, for geography

is a closed subject to the rural Venezuelan. Those to whom I mentioned

that I came from the United States were sure to make some such remark

as, “Ah, United States of Venezuela?”—evidently thinking those two parts

of the same country. Lopez asked me one day, in an unusual fit of

curiosity, whether the money he had been using all his life was not

minted in my country, because it said “Estados Unidos de Venezuela” on

each coin. He was typical of the soul of the common people of that

misruled “republic,” harassed by fate, the government, the climate, the

difficulty of making the most meager living, and his faint, almost

unconscious longing for light, scarcely daring to mention his views on

politics even to a footsore foreigner, so dreaded are the tyrants whose

names are spoken by this class, if at all, only in whispers. Outwardly

many of their manners and opinions are ludicrous, but one comes to learn

that these little brown people have their own ego under their

comic-opera looks and actions.

At the very next house we stopped for an hour while Lopez bargained for

_chinchorros_, his trade being that of _chinchorrero_, or buyer of the

grass hammocks that serve as beds to most Venezuelans. Vespucci found

the Indians of the Orinoco sleeping in the tops of trees, at least in

flood time, and named the country “Little Venice.” Their descendants

still sleep in tree-tops, though now woven into hammocks. _Chinchorros_

are made of the tender center leaf of the _moriche_ palm, which men and

boys climb as material is needed, turning it over to the weavers, who

almost invariably are women. It is either a fact or a persistent

superstition that the finer grade of hammocks can only be woven by women

and in the early morning or late evening when the dew gives the air a

proper humidity; so at those hours one may come upon a girl or matron at

almost any hut in this region diligently rolling the split palm-leaves

into twine against her bare leg, for which there is believed to be no

effective substitute. Whether both delusions have not been deliberately

nurtured by the men for their own advantage is at least a reasonable

question.

The heavier and cheaper grades of hammock, however, can be made under

less picturesque conditions, hence are astonishingly low in price. At

two neighboring huts Lopez bought a dozen for the equivalent of $7.70,

but the sun was high before they had been paid for and loaded. He hoped

to sell them in Barcelona on the north coast for about $10, also the

recruit donkey for a similar advance over its cost. A few miles beyond

we crossed by a narrow pass another great _morichal_ and the River

Tigre, where we swam and drank our fill in spite of the prevalence of

alligators, for another waterless nine leagues lay before us. In such

situations endurance depends mainly on the power of detaching oneself

from one’s surroundings, and I found that by picturing to myself in

detail the approaching arrival home to which I had so long looked

forward, I could banish even raging thirst into the dim background. Thus

I managed to plod fully half the distance on my tortured feet before

opening my bottle of water. We set the swiftest pace of which we were

capable in order to have the ordeal over as soon as possible, but bit by

bit the water and then the few small green lemons we had picked up at

the last house were consumed, and still the shimmering, withered desert

crept up over the horizon. To save my soles from the gridirons of

purgatory I could not increase my pace in proportion to my raging

thirst. The sun beat down from sheer overhead, began its decline, peered

in under my hat-brim, and still the painful, choking, unbroken plodding

continued. Lopez judged the hour by his shadow, and I by a toss of the

head till the sunlight struck my eyes, a gesture that had become second

nature during my long tramp through South America. Yet there was a

fascination about traveling with these primitive _llaneros_, enduring

all their hardships, entering bit by bit into their taciturn inner

selves, to find them, after all, different, yet strangely like the

generality of mankind.

[Illustration: The hammock-buyer in the bosom of his family]

[Illustration: Policemen of Barcelona, and a part of the city

waterworks]

[Illustration: A glimpse of the Venezuelan capital]

[Illustration: The statue of Simón Bolívar in the central plaza of

Caracas]

At last there appeared, far ahead, a slight ridge, at the base of which

Lopez promised the River Guanipa. As we neared it two horsemen, the only

fellow-travelers we had seen in days, called to my companions from under

some scraggly trees, but I had not their aboriginal endurance in the

matter of thirst and stalked on until I could throw myself face down at

the edge of the river. We had intended to push on to Cantaura, eight

leagues farther, but it was already mid-afternoon, we were sore and

weary, and there was unlimited water close at hand. Moreover, the

horsemen, with whom I found Lopez hobnobbing when I hobbled back,

reported that a “revolution” was raging in Cantaura.

The day before, three hundred bandits, or patriots, according to the

political affiliations of the speaker, had taken captive the local

government, looted the shops, and were now camped on the edge of town.

It was admitted that they were unlikely to molest foreigners; the

ordinary citizen, in fact, is little affected by such “revolutions,”

carried on by a small part of the population and disturbing the general

stream of life less than do our presidential elections. But there was a

possibility that the band might need hammocks, or even wish to add to

their ranks so lusty a youth as Lopez. We therefore swung our

_chinchorros_ under the scrub trees, which gave time not only for a swim

but for a general laundering and, most important of all, a chance to

nurse my lacerated feet. Our new companions were white enough to pass

for Americans, yet they were as ignorant of anything outside their

immediate environment as jungle savages. They did not know, for

instance, that water separated their country from the warring “towns,”

as they called them, of Europe—which they took to be a single small

country from which came all “gringos,” or white foreigners. To them the

great war of which they had heard faint rumors was merely another

“revolution” similar to the one in the nearby village; yet it was plain

that, for all these frequent uprisings instigated by ambitious leaders,

the Venezuelan country people were as peace-loving as they are, like

Spanish peasants, intelligent even though illiterate.

With water at hand and a cool breeze sweeping across the sandy plains, I

looked forward to a comfortable night at last. But it was the first one

in Venezuela when mosquitoes and gnats made me regret abandoning my

_mosquitero_; moreover, Lopez, having decided to push on at midnight,

spent the interval incessantly chattering with his new friends, the

conversation consisting mainly of a similar but much stronger expletive

than “Caramba!” At midnight he decided to go later, when the stars came

out, and renewed the profane prattle; then we could not find one of the

donkeys, and I got at last a little sleep. When I awoke the stars had

abandoned the sky and the birds in the trees were beginning to twitter.

There was a classical sunrise that morning, for the rays streamed out

fan-shape on the clouds, as from the throne of God in old religious

paintings, no doubt modeled from this very phenomenon of nature. Long

after this was dissipated, we were still wandering the countryside,

looking for the lost donkey. When at last we were off, I had not

finished redressing my tender feet after fording the river before we got

a “_palo d’agua_,” a sudden heavy shower that drenched us through and

through. In the unladylike words of my companions something or other was

always “_echando una vaina_,” which is the nearest Venezuelan equivalent

to “raising hell.”

We marched four leagues in sand and cutting grass, with muddy pools to

wade here and there, all very slowly because a sick donkey was unable to

keep a fast pace, even though “stark naked.” I arrived, therefore, at a

sluggish river in time to swim and get dressed again before the others

overtook me; but here Lopez left his negro assistant to bring in the

ailing burro, and we covered at our old pace the four leagues remaining.

The country changed completely from sandy _llano_ to stony hills, in

which a well-marked road cut zigzags. Worn, hot, and hungry, we came in

the early afternoon to Cantaura, a flat, quadrangular, silent town in

sand and weeds, of several thousand inhabitants. There were five by

seven solid blocks of mud houses, every corner one a shop with the

counter aslant it and scanty custom or stock-in-trade. It was an

incredibly languid town, much given to the crime of bringing into the

world children who could not be properly cared for, so that no woman who

could by hook or crook have an infant in arms was without one, and they

swarmed everywhere in spite of a naturally, perhaps fortunately, high

death rate. In fact, it was incredible how many human beings were

vegetating here, doing nothing but a little apathetic shopkeeping and

hammock-making, with the silence and inertia of the grave over

everything.

All sorts of odds and ends of humanity were tucked away in the

rambling old adobe houses, in one of which we at once made ourselves

at home, tethering the donkeys in a patio filled with weeds and bush,

and swinging our hammocks in the monasterial old _corredor_

surrounding it. Here we gave the slatternly woman of the house thirty

cents with which to buy beef and rice and make us a stew, she no more

thinking of charging us for the cooking than for room to hang our

_chinchorros_. Eggs were three for five cents; a large corn biscuit,

or _pan de arepa_, was one cent; “wheat bread,” as a tiny, dry ring of

baked flour of the size and shape of a bracelet was called, cost

something more than that; native cheese, _papelón_, even milk, though

probably from goats and certainly boiled, could be had by persons of

wealth. It was not long after our arrival, therefore, that Lopez and I

might have been seen squatting beside a makeshift table, eating in a

Lord-knows-when-I’ll-get-another-meal manner, with a crowd of dirty

women and children hovering about us and the kitchen, waiting to

snatch any scraps we might leave. One of the former passed the time by

feeding black coffee to a hollow-eyed baby some eight months old.

These people disregard the most commonplace principles of health,

wealth, and marriage—though certainly not with impunity. The town had

no water supply except a sluggish creek two miles away, to which I had

been forced to hobble even to wash my hands. Asses brought two small

barrels of it to a house for five cents, but even they were lazy, and

many people had no such sum, so that not only do the people almost

never wash, but a thirsty man must often canvass several families

before he gets a drink of water in which newly dug potatoes appear to

have been soaked. Like the political atrocities which long experience

has made seem unavoidable, these torpid people endured these things

without complaint or the thought of a possible remedy.

The “revolution” two days before had been much less serious than the

telegraph, a strictly government organ, had reported to the outside

world. It was the first anniversary of the organizing of a revolt

against the national tyrant by a man highly favored in this region by

all except the political powers. That date had to be celebrated by a

“gesture” that would be heard even in Caracas; besides, the

revolutionists were hungry. On the other hand, they did not wish to

antagonize the generally friendly metropolis of Cantaura. The three

hundred, therefore, had camped nearby and sent a delegation of thirty

men into the town, to take the _gobernador_ prisoner—merely as a sign of

disdain to the hated tyrant who had appointed him, for that evening he

was released at his own _hato_. No shot had been fired, all food had

been paid for, and nothing stolen. It is not the revolutionists whom the

people of the _llanos_ fear, but the government soldiers, who enter

houses, attack women, and carry off anything that takes their fancy. In

Venezuela the government picks up men of the lower classes wherever it

can find them and impresses them into the army. It is not only the

favorite depository for criminals, but fully two thirds of their thirty

cents a day is stolen from the soldiers by those higher up, hence,

though they are rarely men enough to revolt against their oppressors,

they are quick to pass their misfortunes on to the population. In this

case, as in many others, the knightly deportment of the revolutionary

leader was not matched by the tyrant in power, for less than a fortnight

later he and a score of his staff were given no quarter when the

government troops surrounded them.

Lopez bought four dozen more hammocks in Cantaura, and I a bag of food

to share with him in return for the privilege of loading it on one of

his donkeys, though the favor would have been granted me in any case,

for I had gradually found that there was a moderately kind heart beneath

the taciturn, part-Indian exterior of the _chinchorrero_. An older man

in the selfsame two-piece cotton garments, peaked hat of coarsest straw,

and bare feet thrust into cowhide sandals, had joined us, making our

party four men and as many donkeys. We plunged at once into a country

quite different from that I had so far seen, becoming involved in a

series of foothills which gradually rose higher and higher until the

ranges seemed to be climbing pellmell one over another in a vain effort

to escape some unseen terror. They were covered with thick woods, and at

first the well-marked trail of hard earth promised comfortable, shady

going; but soon that other curse of the foot-traveler descended in

torrents that almost made the drought of bygone days seem preferable.

Pounds of mud clung to every step; the earth grasped the heels of my low

shoes as in a clamp, requiring the full force of each leg to set it

before the other. I dared not drop behind; luckily, the others could not

go much faster than I, their only advantage being that they could wash

their bare feet or sandals in any stream without stopping, while I must

carry the mud on.

Toward noon the country opened out once more, with fewer woods and lower

hills, and we were dry again by the time we finished the day’s toil at a

weed-hidden village. The next night’s stopping-place was, I believe, the

most horrible in all South America. Two old huts covered with ancient

reeds and completely surrounded, inside and out, with every filth of man

and beast, were inhabited by a fully white and well formed man, who

stumped about on legs completely hidden under many layers of the foulest

contamination. This had invaded everything, including the slatternly

blond mother and her half-dozen of what seemed beneath the mire to be

tow-headed children, the whole family rapidly going blind from some

disease resembling ophthalmia. Yet they seemed to have no inkling of

their abominations. The man chattered politics as if he might at any

moment be called to the presidency and handed me a foul liquid as if it

were the finest drinking water. The next day was laborious, though not

thirsty, Lopez leading the way along single-file paths and short cuts

over hill and dale through dense low woods. Now and then we broke out

upon a hot, bare stretch, where my companions sometimes threw themselves

face-down to drink liquid mud from some hollow in the ground. During the

afternoon the “road” was full of loose rocks of all sizes, which

tortured my maltreated feet almost beyond endurance. We reached the mud

village of Caripe before sunset, but Lopez had relatives farther on, so

we followed the “camino real” and a telegraph wire for several more

toilsome, up-and-down miles, the hammock-buyer now and then repeating a

cheerful, “We are almost at the door of the house.” Presently we left

the main trail and plunged off into the wet, black, silent night,

through hilly woods and head-high weeds, through knee-deep mud-holes and

past frog-chanting lagoons, to come at last upon two miserable huts

swarming with gaunt and savage curs and harboring vociferous, unwashed

people without number. They gave me scant greeting, and when I insisted

on having something hot to eat for the first time in three days, Lopez

explained that my stomach was “delicate.” By admitting this calumny I

obtained a soup made of two eggs, after which seven of us men swung our

hammocks in the open-pole kitchen. Water was so scarce that I had to

wait until all the others were audibly asleep before filching two tiny

canfuls from the mouldy kitchen jar to pour on my burning, itching feet

and legs.

Being now only four leagues from his native El Pilar, Lopez left his

hammocks and asses to be brought in by the others, and saddling the new

donkey, which he had reduced in a week from a fine animal to a wreck,

and putting on a five-dollar velour sombrero for which he had spent in

Ciudad Bolívar his earnings on the trip before he earned them, he rode

away through the wet, early morning woods almost faster than I could

limp along behind him. But his plan of making a triumphal entry into his

native town met with poor success. The trail was so rough and rocky, so

up and down and hot and endless, that the animal all but dropped, and

Lopez had to get off and drive him. Such was his haste to get home that

I should certainly have been left far behind had he not every little

while met a friend on a donkey or a horse and paused to give him the

limp greeting customary to the region and to exchange the latest local

gossip. The invariable term of endearment was “chico,” rather than the

“ché” of the southern end of the continent, and to every man he met

during this last part of the journey Lopez gave the mild _abrazo_ of

rural Venezuelans, who do not shake hands, but stand at arm’s length and

touch each other on the shoulder. Finally we got into a pocket of

heavily wooded, low hills, everywhere choked with weeds, though there

were some cornfields, the ears broken half off and left hanging to

ripen. When it appeared at last amid such surroundings, El Pilar proved

to be the usual collection of ancient and decrepit mud huts set in a

tangle of jungle and weeds. Just at the edge of town Lopez mounted, and

with his new velour hat set at a rakish angle and his bare feet armed

with cruel spurs, to say nothing of the cudgel in his hand, he forced

the gaunt and worn-out donkey to prance into town like an army charger.

But again his plans came to grief. For the misused brute, not being

accustomed to the roar and hubbub of towns, effectually balked, and for

a hot and sweaty half hour the returning hammock-buyer had the

ignominious task of beating, pushing, dragging, and cudgeling the animal

through the gaping village to his own house. I meanwhile being reduced

to the necessity of carrying my own bundle.

During the journey Lopez had never failed to raise his ragged straw hat

whenever he passed any of those crude shrines that mark the last

resting-place of those of his fellow-travelers who have succumbed to the

perils of the _llanos_ trails; and he had been diligent in keeping in

constant sight a charm in the form of an embroidered red heart worn

about his neck. Now it was evident that he had reached home and that

danger was over, for he hung the charm carelessly on the adobe wall, and

passed the local cemetery without so much as noticing it, though his

parents and grandparents lay buried there. He lived with several sisters

and a brother in the usual mud hut opening on a baked mud yard, with an

open-pole kitchen in which even stray pigs were not considered out of

place; but at least his sisters were quiet and outwardly cleanly, almost

attractive, and when Lopez, with a princely gesture, threw a peso down

before them and commanded “a huge hot meal,” such as he had learned

would win my approval, they obeyed his orders almost with alacrity.

Meanwhile I went up into the woods to a stream that had left pools of

clear water among rocks, and sitting down with a calabash, poured it

over me like a Hindu performing his sacred ablutions at Benares. I was

probably more soiled and ragged than I had ever been in a long career of

vagabondage, but at least this promised to be the last South American

mud village in which I should ever sleep. When I had put on my newly

washed pajamas and hobbled back to the house, a great chicken-stew

awaited us. Lopez and I made entirely away with it, together with a kind

of baked squash and several _arepas_; and when it casually leaked out

that eggs cost one cent each in El Pilar, I produced a _bolívar_ with

the request to get me twenty of them, half of which I shared with Lopez,

while ordering the rest prepared for supper and breakfast. When, in

addition to all this, we did away with a whole watermelon, the wonder of

the family and the village was complete. Having taught the hammock-buyer

the meaning of a real meal, I assumed for a moment the unaccustomed rôle

of missionary and strove to show his relatives why their customary diet,

with its miserable coarse cassava and stone-cold _arepas_, was not

conducive to longevity.

“Now I am a dozen years older than Lopez,” I began.

“Impossible!” interrupted his sisters, looking from his face to mine.

“Yet both his father and mother, like the fathers and mothers of many

countrymen of Venezuela as young as he, have been dead and gone for

years.”

“And yours?” inquired the girls.

“Still quite young and lively, thank you,” I replied; “and my

grandfather....”

“What—your _grand_father!” cried the astounded family of El Pilar.

The peep of dawn saw me bidding Lopez farewell—and promising to send him

dozens of the many photographs the family had insisted on my taking, or

pretending to take, of them. I led the sun by more than an hour into the

jungle valley through which a stony and mountainous trail lifted me to a

summit, where, across wave after wave of blue wooded hills, appeared the

Caribbean, as a signal that I had at last walked South America off the

map. Huts were fairly thick among hills that grew ever lower and then

less stony, the way several times following the gravelly beds of dry

streams, until at last it broke out upon a perfectly level flat country

of cactus and dry, thorny bush. Here there was for a long time total

silence, except for the wail of the mourning dove, so characteristic a

sound in this sort of landscape. Then abruptly, without warning, I

emerged upon an absolute desert, bare and sandy looking as the Sahara.

Instead of the deep sand I expected, however, the soil proved to be

mud-flats, now dried and checkered in the sun, and good smooth going,

with a telegraph wire for guide—though a bit of rain would have made it

almost impassable. Soon I was surprised to hear the roar of breakers,

and when I was high enough to look over a sort of natural sand dike,

there lay the whole blue Caribbean, with what I had taken for another

range of hills rising out of it in the form of rocky islands—and,

confound my luck if, hull-down on the horizon and spitting black smoke

scornfully back at me, there was not a steamer racing in full speed in

the direction of La Guayra!

The mud-flats alternated now and then with deep sand or patches of

thorny bush and cactus, a most miserable setting for what I at last made

out to be the church-towers of Barcelona, fifth or sixth city of

Venezuela, with some 15,000 apathetic inhabitants. But as if fate would

give me one last slap before we parted, an arm of the sea appeared when

I was almost inside the city and drove me and the trail miles back into

the thirsty bush, scrambling through cactus, springing across mud-holes,

forever limping painfully onward. Then at last I emerged upon a cement

sidewalk on an otherwise dirty, tumble-down, earth-floored town of flat

gridiron formation, inhabited by a ragged and uninteresting population

conspicuously Latin-American in all its manifestations, even to

striking, upon the appearance of a stranger, an attitude in which to

enjoy so rare a sight at ease and to the full as long as he remained

visible.

[Illustration: A bread-seller of Caracas]

[Illustration: The birthplace of Simón Bolívar of Caracas, the

“Washington of South America”]

[Illustration: A street in Caracas]

[Illustration: The Municipal Theater of Caracas]

It was evident that my luck, if I ever had any, had completely deserted

me. Six hours before my arrival, the lonely little train of Barcelona

had left for Huanta, whence the steamship _Manzanares_ would have set me

down in La Guayra the next morning at a cost of thirteen _bolívares_.

Now, thanks to that half day of loafing in El Pilar, I might wait two or

three weeks for another steamer. There were, to be sure, small

freight-carrying sailboats advertised to leave from time to time; but

their agents in Barcelona seemed to have little interest in passengers,

particularly a mere “gringo.” For two days I pursued captains of such

craft from rosy dawn to the last note of the evening concert in the

central plaza, with no other gain than the rather sullen information

that there might be a boat leaving mañana. Meanwhile my slender funds

were going for corn-bread, and my patience was oozing away in the

monotony of the sand-paved, donkey-gaited mud town where not even a book

was to be had. Then one morning the captain of the sailboat _Josefita_

agreed to let me sit on his deck from Huanta to La Guayra for only twice

the steamer fare, and I bumped away in the ridiculous little train to a

port consisting mainly of mud huts, cocoanut-trees, and an elaborate

stone customhouse. Here a long formality and the payment of half a dozen

government fees were required for a “permission to embark”—from one

miserable port to another of the same country—and I was ready to intrust

my future existence to the equally capricious ocean winds and Venezuelan

temperament.

The _Josefita_ was a large covered rowboat with a sail, on which was

painted in huge figures the number required by Venezuelan law on all

such craft. The captain took on a few extra beans for the benefit of his

solitary passenger; but I played safe by filling my own sack with

corn-buns, native cheese, and _papelón_, and by some stroke of luck I

picked up a Spanish translation of Paul de Kock with which to pass the

time. Besides the captain and myself there were four ragged sailors,

neither old nor young, and, strangely enough, wholly free from African

taint. We were loaded with a few hundred native cheeses in banana-leaf

wrappings when we began crawling across the bay to take on mineral water

at Lajita. A rocky, half-perpendicular coast with scanty tufts of green

vegetation sloped down into the blue Caribbean in which I trailed my

rapidly healing feet. At four o’clock we drifted up to a beach and a

thatched village that we seemed to have passed by train that morning,

where we anchored while the captain and half the crew rowed ashore.

There they were gone for hours, evidently helping nature run down the

mineral water, for toward sunset there came from the land the sound of

boxes being nailed up. Meanwhile nature had produced considerable water

on her own account in a long series of thunder-showers that fell with an

abrupt whispering sound all around the boat. Most of this delay I spent

swimming over the side, trusting to my eyes to detect in time any

sharp-toothed danger in the clear, azure sea, then retired to the tiny

cockpit, where the so-called cook brought me a plate of plain rice and,

evidently as a special concession to first-class passengers, the front

end of a boiled fish.

When the sun burned out again through the mists, we were speeding along

in a spanking breeze after a night in which a heavy sea had tossed us

constantly back and forth on the stone-hard deck, shipping water to soak

us wherever the rain had not done so already. Lest we might have dozed

in spite of all this, the ragamuffin at the wheel had broken forth every

five minutes in a howling wail of extemporized “song” which was meant to

encourage the wind and perhaps to scare off the evil spirits that ride

the darkness. The wind soon died, however, and at noon we were still

flapping with idle canvas in a calm, unbroken sea. The book I had picked

up was too silly for words; my five companions were utterly devoid of

human interest; our miserable fare, concocted by a “cook” who did not

know enough to boil water, was strongly scented with kerosene; and most

of the day was spent in a dispute between the captain and the singing

sailor, who, it seemed, could not read the compass and had taken us far

out to sea, when our safety depended on keeping within sight of land.

The crew had almost nothing to do but tack two or three times a day, and

spent the rest of the time sleeping on the bare deck, except the cook

and steersmen, who were lazily engaged at their tasks most of the time.

The sea, of the deepest possible blue, as if all the indigo trees of the

tropics had spilled their product into it, rose and sank in its endless

unrest without our advancing a yard. Well on in the afternoon a puffing

breeze developed, and on the far port horizon appeared a few stenciled

mountains. Gradually we drew near enough to see that they were clothed

with forest to the very sea’s edge. With anything like a fair wind we

could have made La Guayra that evening, but the breeze was genuinely

Venezuelan. At sunset a school of dolphins surrounded the boat so

closely as almost to graze its sides, and for an hour indulged in

athletic feats, like a crowd of schoolboys showing off, not only diving

entirely out of water so near that we could almost have put out a hand

and touched them, but giving themselves two, and even three, complete

whirling turns in the air, like somersaulting circus performers, before

falling back into the sea with a mighty splash.

Dawn found us crawling close along a shore of sheer bush-grown mountains

lost in low clouds, lame with constant rolling on the hard deck and

disgusted with the monotony of existence. With La Guayra almost in sight

at the far point of this range, called the Silla de Caracas, we tacked

all morning against a head wind without seeming to advance a foot along

the roaring rocky mountain wall. Life on the ocean wave may sound

romantic on paper, but in a dirty and hungry sailboat off the coast of

Venezuela it calls for other descriptive adjectives. No doubt I needed

this final, post-graduate course in patience before leaving a

patience-training continent. Once we anchored to keep from losing the

little we had gained, and all day and the following night we rolled and

tossed in the selfsame spot, the man at the rudder trying alternately to

charm the wind with his raucous voice and to scare it into motion with a

vociferous “_Viento sinvergüenza, caramba!_” Now and then during the

night the snapping of canvas and the rattling of blocks above gave the

sensation that we were really moving at last, but when morning broke we

were off the very rock beside which we had lain down the night before.

Gradually, however, the breeze increased with the rising sun, and we

began to move swiftly through the water; but so strong is the current

along this coast that we seemed to remain for hours opposite identically

the same peak of the Sierra de Avila. Then we rolled for hours within

plain sight of La Guayra in a sea as flat as if oil had been poured on

it, without even a man at the rudder, so hopeless was everyone on board.

I had nothing to read; there was not a foot of space in which to walk; I

could not swim because of sharks; there was not a person of intelligence

within sound of my voice; even our miserable food was virtually gone;

there was only a bit of filthy, lukewarm water, full of all sorts of

sediment, at the bottom of the barrel, and still we flopped motionless

on a windless sea under a grilling sun. I understood at last what it

means to get oneself into a boat.

By taking advantage of every faintest puff of breeze, our leather-faced

old salt coaxed us along during the afternoon, until a stiffening wind

overtook us at last and we slipped ever more rapidly along the great

mountain wall. Tiny villages here and there clung far up on little knobs

of land; great shadowy valleys and sun-defying corners; a town here and

there along the base, all seemed to bake in the tropical sun, and

certainly to sleep. By four o’clock La Guayra lay before us, its bathing

resort of Macuto just off our port beam; yet so Venezuelan was the wind

that we did not know whether we could reach harbor in time to be allowed

ashore. I might have landed and walked into town long since, were it not

illegal for passengers to enter Venezuela except at a regular port with

a customhouse. It is a splendid arrangement for politicians, but of

small advantage to becalmed or shipwrecked sailors. I shaved, however,

poured sea-water over my maltreated body, put on the only clothing I had

left after pitching my rags overboard, and presented the captain with

the old felt hat that had protected me from the sun in fourteen

countries. This last act may have induced his ally, the wind, to waft us

in behind the breakwater while the sun was still above the horizon.

However, being in port in Venezuela is not synonymous with going

ashore. Once at anchor, almost within springing distance of a stone

wharf, I had to wait while the captain went to report my existence and

set in motion all the formalities, including the payment of fees, that

were required exactly as if I had been landing from a foreign country.

To tell the truth, no sane person would be eager to get ashore in La

Guayra, unless it was in the hope of immediately going elsewhere. A

parched and thirsty town, in spite of the brilliant blue sea beating

at its feet, with rows of unattractive houses, all alike except in

slight variations of color, and even those in pastel shades lacking

vividness, strewn irregularly, singly, in groups, and in one larger

mass, up dull-red and sand-colored hills which piled precipitously

into the sky, it plainly had little attractiveness except as a

picturesque ensemble from a distance. Trails climbed straight up this

sheer mountain-wall, as if in haste to escape the hot and ugly town at

its feet, while a carriage-road and a railway set out more decorously

along the shore for the same destination,—Caracas.

A brass-tinted, supercilious official with a prejudice against shaving,

who was lolling beneath a regal awning, had himself rowed out at last to

ask me a score of absurd questions and set my answers down at length in

a book, after which he went ashore again to advise the government

whether or not I should be granted an “order of disembarkment”—without

which I must continue to sit out here in the blazing sun even though the

“_Caracas_ of Wilmington, Delaware,” across the harbor were about to

sail and I eager to take it. By and by a yellow negro rowed out to ask

if I had a visiting-card to prove my respectability, saying the

_prefectura_ was “making some question” about my landing. Another hour

passed, and at last a boat was sent to take me ashore, where I applied

at once to the collector of customs for the baggage I had intrusted to

the purser of the Dutch boat that had dropped me at Trinidad. Luckily,

the latter had carried out instructions, or I should scarcely have dared

venture up to Caracas. Meanwhile, one of the men who had rowed out for

me was dogging my footsteps with a want-a-tip air. He was, it turned

out, collector for the _corporación_, the foreign company that built the

docks of La Guayra, and which exacts forty cents for every passenger who

lands—or sixty, if he comes from a boat not tied up to the wharf. But

instead of collecting it in an office, or in an official way, he

followed me about like a bootblack and then tried to squeeze an extra

“commission” out of me on the ground that he had been forced to follow

me about.

This “corporation,” which is English, holds what is rated “one of the

finest grafts” in South America, having the right for ninety-nine years

to charge for every person, every pound of merchandise, every trunk,

valise, and even handbag, which embarks or disembarks in La Guayra, to

say nothing of heavy fees for every ship that enters the harbor. Yet so

overrun is it said to be with native employees forced upon it by

politicians that the “graft” is by no means so splendid as it sounds.

Venezuela is notoriously in the front rank of political corruption in

South America, and La Guayra is its greatest single fleecing-place. From

the instant he enters this chief port the stranger is hounded at every

turn by grasping, insolent officials and political favorites permitted

to indulge in the most absurd extortions, a spirit which pervades the

entire population down to the last impudent, rascally street-urchin.

Taxes, dues and customs duties have frankly been made not only as high

and onerous but as complicated as possible, in order to mulct the

taxpayer or importer to the advantage of swarming loafers in government

uniform. A most intricate system of fines and penalties is imposed, for

instance, by the customs regulations, for the slightest errors in

invoices. The collectors receive meager salaries, but the discoverer of

any “violation” of the elaborate statutes pockets one half the fine

imposed, with the result that there is an un-Venezuelan zeal in looking

for flaws, and fines are assessed even for the omission of commas, the

faulty use of semicolons, and for abbreviations.

One can scarcely blame a man forced to live in La Guayra, however, for

taking it out on his fellow-man. Piled up the sheer, arid mountain-wall

with only two streets on the level, and with the sun baking in upon it

all day, it feels like a gigantic oven; certainly it was the hottest

place I had ever seen in South America. Nor was it the stirring,

endurable heat, tempered by a constant breeze, of most of the continent,

but a sweltering, melting temperature that not only left me drenched

with perspiration within a minute after I had stepped ashore, but which

made it impossible even to write because one’s hands soaked the paper,

which set one to dripping before he sat down to early morning coffee.

Everyone in town had a wilted, unshaven, downcast air, as if hating

himself and the world at large for his uncomfortable existence. To add

to my disgust, it was Friday, and the penetrating stink of fish pervaded

every corner of the organized squalor, pursuing me even into the highest

room of the dirty negro _pension_ which posed as a hotel. The only

endurable place in town was a little piece of park and promenade along

the edge of the sea; but the bestial habits of the populace had sullied

even the ocean breezes.

The “Ferrocarril La Guaira á Caracas,” built in 1885 by an English

company, takes twenty-four miles to cover an actual distance of about

eight, with a fare of ten cents a mile and a train in each direction

twice a day. So often had I climbed by rail abruptly into the clouds in

South America that this was no new experience. Moreover, the climb is

much less lofty than several others, though there is much the same

sensation as one goes swiftly up from sea-level in vast curves around

the reddish desert hills, with an ever-opening vista of La Guayra and

its adjacent towns along the scalloped shore. Then the train squirms in

and out of Andean ranges, at times utterly barren, at others green, past

dizzy precipices and mighty valleys, the stone-faced cartload climbing

in vast turns in the same general direction. At the halfway station of

Zigzag we passed the down train, after which we rumbled quite a while

across a plateau country among mountain heights, until finally there

burst upon me the last South American capital—striking, but not to be

compared with the first view of several others.

Caracas has “some 11,000 houses and 80,000 inhabitants,” including its

suburbs, partly because the constant revolutions have driven the

population to the national capital for protection. A tyrant can do

things out on the lonely _llanos_ which he would not dare do in the

shadow of his own palace. Being but three thousand feet above sea-level,

it lacks many of the unique features of lofty Bogotá, Quito, or La Paz;

yet it is high enough to have a cool mountain air that quickly fills the

traveler in the tropics with new life. Seated in a mountain lap twelve

miles by three in size, the Sierra de Avila cuts it off from the sea and

high hills enclose it on all sides. The site is uneven, especially

toward the range, its upper part covered with forest, over which climb

the same direct trails one sees scrambling up the far more precipitous

mountain face from La Guayra. Here and there the town is broken up by

_quebradas_ and several small streams, of which the Guaire is almost a

river; yet Caracas in its lap of green hills is not itself hilly, but

merely undulating, its streets rolling leisurely away across town, with

a considerable slope from north to south, so that every shower washes

the city, and the tropical deluges to which it is sometimes subject make

rivers of the north-and-south streets. The Venezuelan capital has little

of the picturesqueness of several west-coast capitals. There are no

Indians with their distinctive dress, no paganish street-calls, no

quaint aboriginal customs. On the other hand, it is well put together,

with good pavements and sidewalks, instead of cobbled roads with

flagstones down the center, and has a more up-to-date air, as if closer

in touch with the world than the loftier cities to the west, and it is

at least a pretty city from whatever hillside one looks down upon it.

The houses are wrong side out, of course, after the Moorish-Spanish

fashion, the streets faced by ugly bare walls, with the flowery gardens

and the pretty girls within. It has by no means so many churches per

capita as some of its neighbors, though many priests are to be seen,

sometimes standing on the corners smoking cigarettes and “talking girls”

with their layman fellow-sports. The cathedral houses a fine painting,

unusual in South American churches, an enormous “Last Supper” by a

Venezuelan who died while engaged upon it, so that portions are merely

sketched. Beside the National Theater there is a bronze statue of

Washington, erected during the centenary of Bolívar in 1883. He has no

cause to feel lonely, even so far from home, for Caracas swarms with

national heroes—in statues, the only muscular, full-chested men in town,

unless one be misled by the splendid tailor-made shoulders in the plazas

and paseos. No other city of its size, evidently, was the birthplace of

so many great men. Nearly every other house bears a tablet announcing it

as the scene of the first squall of “Generalisimo” Fulano or of “the

great genius” Solano. Not all of these, however, are mere local

celebrities; two simple old houses bear the tablets of Andrés Bello, the

grammarian, whose fame reached to Chile and to Spain, and of Simón

Bolívar, “the Liberator.”

Somehow, when one has been out of it for a time, the Latin-American

atmosphere is almost pleasing—when one is in a mood for it. Here I found

myself enjoying again the hoarse screams of lottery-ticket vendors, the

cries of milk-dealers on horseback, their cans dangling beneath their

legs, the bread-man with his red, white and blue barrel on either side

of the horse he rides, the countless little shops where refugees,

huddling under the protection of the capital, strive to make both ends

meet by trying to sell something, content at least to be no longer at

the mercy of government as well as revolutionists out on the little

farms that have long since gone back to jungle. Caracas rises and begins

business later than La Guayra, where the heat of noonday makes a siesta

imperative; it is a bit less foppish than Bogotá or Quito, perhaps

because of its greater proximity to the world. Here, too, are ragged men

and boys who soften their incessant appeals by using a diminutive “Tiene

usted un fosforito?” “Dame un centavito, caballero?” “Regálame un

regalito, quiere?” It is easier to comply now and then with such

requests in a city where prices have not leaped skyward, as in most of

the world. At the “Hotel Filadelfia” my room and food cost four

_bolívares_ (almost eighty cents) a day. True, I found my hammock more

comfortable than the bed, though the nights were somewhat chilly in it;

and the impudence, indolence, and indifference of the _caraqueño_

servant is notorious. Ask anyone, from manager to the kitchen-boy, to do

something, and the reply was almost certain to be a sullen, “That’s not

my work,” nor would they ever deign to pass the word on to whosoever’s

work it was. Evidently they belonged to a union. As in Ecuador, hotel

guests were forbidden to talk politics.

Some of the principal streets were lined with gambling houses of all

classes, from two-cent-ante workmen’s places to sumptuous parlors with

pianos playing and the doors wide open to all, even to a penurious

“gringo” who came only to watch the heavy-eyed croupiers and the other

curious night types who make their living by coin manipulation. Though

“the cheapest thing in Caracas is women,” they are seldom seen on the

streets. Illegitimacy, like illiteracy, is more prevalent than its

opposite, but it is not the Spanish-American way to flaunt social vices.

American influence is more in evidence than in any other South American

country; Caracas is the only city on that continent where I saw native

boys playing baseball. Germans control much of the commerce and the

longest railway in the country, from Caracas to Puerto Cabello, but with

these exceptions the English hold most large enterprises, including

electric-lights, telephones, and street-cars, and are reputed to be

clever in keeping out American competition.

Like Santiago de Chile, Caracas has a limited number of “best families,”

who form the “aristocracy” and to some extent an oligarchy, though

intermarriage has produced among them some of the ills of European

royalty. There are good-looking, not a few pretty, and even occasionally

beautiful women in this class, though the casual visitor sees them only

behind the bars of their windows or promenading in carriages and

automobiles around El Paraiso across the Guaire on Sunday afternoons,

and at the evening band concerts in the Plaza Bolívar. On the whole,

this so-called higher class is more corrupt and worthless than the

workers, especially those of the _llanos_, who at least are laborious

and long-suffering, even though ignorant, superstitious, and often

victims of the same erotic influences as the rich and educated. It is

natural that the political power in Venezuela should have been wrested

from this weak “aristocracy” by hardier types from the interior.

The most notorious of these, the chief founder of that military

dictatorship which to this day holds Venezuela in a tighter grip than

any other country in South America, was Castro. Charles II of England

would have felt at home with this fallen tyrant, a degenerate who made

use of his power and government riches to corrupt the maidenhood of his

native land. His subordinates, especially the governor of the federal

district, were chosen less for their ability as rulers than for their

success in coaxing young girls to visit the tyrant in a house across the

Guaire, where he carried on his amours almost publicly. In those days

Caracas was overrun with saucy little presidential mistresses in short

skirts. Force, or anything else likely to lead to public scandal,

however, was not included among Castro’s amorous weapons—for there was a

Señora Castro before whose wrath the highest authorities of Venezuela

were wont to flee in dismay. The terror which Castro himself still

evokes among the masses of the country is such that his name to this day

is almost never openly spoken. In Ciudad Bolívar I sat one evening,

reading an exaggerated tale of the tyrant’s lust, a book proscribed in

Venezuela but stacked up in the book-stores of Trinidad, when the

hotel-keeper paused to ask in a trembling voice how I dared have such a

volume in my possession.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Ah, it is true,” he answered, turning away, “in the great United States

there are no tyrants to make a man fear his own shadow.”

Aside from his patent faults, however, Castro was a man of strength and

native ability; though this was offset by his provincial ignorance, a

misconception of the unknown outside world which led him to believe he

could easily thrash England, France and Germany combined, so that he

took pains to alienate foreign governments. It is an error into which

his successor has been careful not to fall.

General Juan Vicente Gomez is an _andino_, like Castro—that is, a man

from the mountainous part of the country near the Colombian border, with

considerable Indian blood and a primitive force that overwhelms the

soft-handed “aristocracy” of Caracas which once ruled the country. Like

Castro, he is ignorant, strong, coarse, and shrewd—fond of young women,

too, though with strength enough to put them into the background when

they interfere with more important matters. Years ago he mortgaged his

property to help Castro, but the latter treated him like a peon, even

after appointing him vice-president. Gomez, however, knew how to bide

his time. By 1908 his dissipations had left Castro no choice but to go

to the German baths or die, and he delegated his power to the obsequious

vice-president and went. A few days later Gomez set out at four in the

morning for a round of the military barracks, called out the commanders,

thrust a revolver into their ribs, and requested them henceforth to bear

in mind that he was president of Venezuela. This was his first

“election.” During his seven-year term he brought about some

improvements, particularly in roads and the army, not to mention

acquiring immense properties, while the exiled Castro was losing his to

former victims who were suing him in the Venezuelan courts. The

constitution stated that a president could not be elected to succeed

himself. Toward the end of his term, therefore, Gomez nominally

resigned, put in a temporary figurehead, and had congress “elect” him

again. At the same time he had a new constitution made in which there is

no mention of reëlections, with the understanding that it was to come

into force when he took the oath of office.

This he was to have done some months before, but, being a cautious man,

as well as preferring country life, “the elect”—never did I meet a

Venezuelan who dared mention him directly by name—remained on his own

ranches in Maracay, a hundred miles out along the German railway,

leaving one of the minor palaces occupied by a tool called “provisional

president.” Castro himself, however, never attained such absolute power

as the new tyrant, who puts recalcitrant congressmen in jail, personally

appoints state, municipal, and rural authorities, and in general smiles

benignly upon the helpless constitution. Not the least amusing contrasts

in Venezuela were the private opinions of its chief newspaper editors

and the slavish attitude of the sheets themselves, the entire front

pages of which were taken up day after day with photographs of the

“President-Elect of the Republic and Commander-in-Chief of the Army” in

this or that daily occupation, followed, to the total exclusion of any

real news, by obsequious telegrams from his henchmen in all parts of the

country, from misinformed foreigners or foreign governments, often from

imaginary sources, congratulating him and his countrymen that “the

greatest man of the century has again been chosen as their leader by the

great and free Venezuelan people.” Even over-altruistic or subsidized

American periodicals with a South American circulation frequently hold

up the present tyrant of Venezuela as an example of the progressive

constitutional ruler. Many of the best people of that country would

prefer even American intervention to the illiterate tyranny which makes

it dangerous to speak their real thoughts above a whisper; but there is

a strict censorship, and Gomez, wiser than Castro, professes great

friendship for all great foreign powers, particularly the overshadowing

“Colossus of the North.”

In the long run a people probably gets about as good a government as it

deserves, and a stern dictator, on the style of Diaz of Mexico, is

perhaps the ruler best suited to Venezuela. But from our more

enlightened point of view such rule would not seem to promise social

improvement. The country is bled white to keep up the army and several

other presidential hobbies, to the exclusion of schools and other forms

of progress. Every cigarette-paper bears a printed government stamp

alleging that it pays duty in benefit of “Instrucción Pública,” a source

yielding more than a million dollars a year; yet it is years since the

students of the University of Caracas struck because Gomez spent the

legal income of the schools on the army, and at last accounts it had not

yet been reopened. The dictator himself can read, but not write, except

to sign his name. Every morning at four he was at his desk in Maracay,

the business of the day laid out before him,—first his private affairs,

next his hobby, the army, then politics and the country in general.

According to a genuine authority on the subject, he laboriously spells

out all the correspondence himself, then calls in a shrewd and trusted

uncle, a man too old to have ambitions to succeed him, and together they

concoct the replies. The present government of Venezuela is truly a

family government. General José Vicente Gomez, the son whom the dictator

is evidently grooming to be his ultimate successor, is Inspector General

of the Army; General Juan Gomez is governor of the federal district;

Colonel Alí Gomez is second vice-president; two other sons are

presidents of states—the dictator, by the way, is a bachelor—and so on

through the family. Like many another Venezuelan of numerous

descendants, “the elect” never married; but of his scores of children by

many different women he has legitimized the few most promising and

lifted them to his own level—a practical, man-governed form of survival

of the fittest.

With the white mists still clinging to Caracas and its sierra, I

strolled out one morning along the “Highway of the West” through the

flat, rich vega to Dos Caminos and Antimano, where the German railway

breaks out of the lap of hills and squirms away to Valencia and Puerto

Cabello. A private way through deep woods with coffee bushes brought me

to the little country home of Manuel Diaz Rodríguez, and at the same

time reminded me that all is not tyranny, sloth, and hopelessness in the

mistreated Land of the Orinoco. For here, amid stretches of light-green

sugar-cane that seems destined ultimately to bring material prosperity

to the country, lives one of South America’s greatest contributors to

modern Spanish literature.

I had planned to say farewell to South America by walking up through the

“Puerta de Caracas” and over the mountain range to La Guayra. But on the

last evening a tropical deluge roared down upon the capital, and I dared

not tempt fate to prevent me from reaching home within four years of my

departure on my Latin-American pilgrimage. The last day of August dawned

brilliant and cool. In my pocket was a ticket to Broadway and just

enough ragged Venezuelan money to carry me down the mountain and through

the swarming grafters of La Guayra to the steamer. Cheery with the

thought of home-coming, I lugged my own baggage—to the disdainful

astonishment of the Venezuelan crowd—out onto the platform and stowed it

away under a second-class bench. I had no sooner stepped back into the

waiting-room, however, than a gaunt and coppery _caraqueño_ slowly

mounted a chair in front of a blackboard over the ticket-office, and

with nerve-racking deliberation began to write, in a schoolboy hand

which required some ten seconds for each stroke and fully fifteen

minutes for the entire announcement:

_NOTICE_

_On account of landslides there will

be no morning train. Notice will be

given if the afternoon train

descends._

I had felt it in my bones! Fate did not purpose that I should ever

escape from this unattractive continent! This was the first train that

had failed to run in eight months, and of course it must be the very one

I had depended on to get me down in time for the steamer. It was too

late to walk—and with my baggage I could not run. Automobiles, quick to

scent trouble, were already raising their price for the trip from $20 to

$30 and $40. At last I found a Ford that would carry me and two other

Americans down for a hundred _bolívares_—which was about ninety more

than we owned among us. But by some stroke of fortune a thoroughly human

minister had been accredited to Caracas by our enigmatical State

Department. I regret to report that we routed him out of bed, and ten

minutes later were dashing full-tilt along the pool-filled and broken

highway to the coast. On the outskirts of the capital there were

innumerable lethargic donkey trains to dodge and pass. Then we were

twisting and turning along the mountain road, with thousands of feet of

loose shale piled sheer above and sudden death falling away directly

below us. The heavy rain had brought down rocks larger than dog-kennels,

and in places had heaped up loose stones and earth until the road was

practically blocked. At one such spot a big, aristocratic automobile

stood eyeing in despair a sharp V-shaped turn it could not make. Our

unpretentious conveyance scampered up on the slide, slipped to the very

edge of the deadly abyss, then climbed down upon solid road again and

sped on. Higher and higher climbed the serpentine _carretera_,

constantly whirling around turns where the slightest slip of the

mechanism or of the doubtful nerves of our very Venezuelan chauffeur

would have ended our journeyings for all time, tearing blindly around

sharp-angled curves with a bare six inches between us and instant death,

and that six inches likely to be treacherous sliding shale. Far up among

the reddish barren hills we passed the summit, then began to descend by

the same perilous highway, where we seemed ever and anon to be riding

off into the bluish void of infinity, suddenly coming cut on a view of

the coast and indigo sea far below us, and for a long time thereafter

winding and twisting incessantly downward, with no certainty that all

our efforts had not been in vain. Then all at once La Guayra appeared,

and out along the breakwater still lay the steamer, tiny as a rowboat

from this height, but plainly in no mood to move until we had time to

comply with the irksome Venezuelan formalities and scramble on board.

But it was a painful anticlimax to the life I had led in South America

to be rescued at the last by a Ford!

Of several hours’ struggle with swarming official and unofficial

grafters, with strutting negroes in uniform and “generals” who signed

with the only word they could write my permission to depart from their

fetid land, of the final cupidities of the “corporation,” I will say

nothing, lest I again be betrayed into language unbefitting a homeward

journey. Suffice it that at last I clambered dripping wet up the

gangway, at the foot of which an ill-bred youth in a Venezuelan uniform

snatched the “permission to embark” in pursuit of which I had spent

perspiring hours, and soon black night had blotted out from my sight the

variegated but not soon to be forgotten continent of South America.

THE END

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Changed “flies of an army” to “files of an army” on p. 73.

2. Changed “With out feet” to “With our feet” on p. 258.

3. Silently corrected typographical errors.

4. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.

5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.