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.
Hammock-makers at home
The palm-leaf threads of the hammocks are made pliable by rubbing them on a bare leg in the early morning before the dew has dried
Lopez buying hammocks
