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:

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.