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.