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.