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 grandfather!” 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: