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.
Lopez uncovers as he passes the last resting-place of a fellow-traveler
Dinner time in rural Venezuela
Lopez enters his native village in style
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.