We were delighted to find a rare water-hole in which to quench our raging thirst
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:
“Y un blanco ha llega-a-a-o
Con los piés maltrata-a-a-o.”
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.