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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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_.