About noon I discovered that we were waiting while an ass that was for sale could be found. Whichever way I guessed on this trip, I was wrong. I had thought that by joining Lopez my progress would be increased; already it looked as if quite the opposite were the case. At last the burro was found; then he must be caught; then he proved malucho, which means almost anything in Venezuela, wild, twisted, wrong, mad, not right in any way. Then there ensued a long Oriental argument about the price, which was finally settled at eighty bolívares ($16.17). Next Lopez must have a document of sale on a sheet out of my note-book and written with my pen—because there was evidently not another one in the region; then he must undo his pack and take out money enough in silver to pay the price, after it had been counted half a dozen times on both sides, and three times by me as confirmation, and finally, at a fine hour to start on a twenty-seven mile tramp across a desert without water, food, or shelter, we were off.
For the first few miles it took the combined exertions of the three of us to initiate the new donkey, who was young, large, and strong, so that by the time we were well out of reach of the river again, our tongues were protruding with thirst. Then we plodded unbrokenly on, hour after hour across a tinder-dry desert of coarse tuft-grass and scraggly trees, slightly rolling in great waves, the “road” a dozen untrodden paths hidden in a grass that tore viciously at our feet. Unless we found a pozo, or hole in the ground, well off the trail at about mid-distance, by spying an extra insulator on the single telegraph-wire that kept more or less beside us, we would come upon no water during the whole twenty-seven miles. I allowed myself two swallows from my bottle at the end of the first blazing half-hour, and as many at regular intervals thereafter, having to share my scanty supply with Lopez. With the typical improvidence of his race he had brought none with him, but being a true Latin-American, he expected to be protected by those who had provided themselves. By good luck, rather than for any other reason, we did catch sight of the white knob on the wire midway between two poles, and after long search found in the immensity of the desert an irregular hole in the ground where water is said to be always clear and good. My bottle filled again, but with my maltreated feet shrinking at every step, we plodded on toward the next water, fifteen miles away. During the last five of them I chewed chicle incessantly, and without it would probably have been capable of drinking the blood of my companions. At last, with dusk settling down, we sighted a good-sized house on a ridge, but as this was a telegraph office, Lopez did not wish to approach it, having the lower-class Venezuelan’s dread of coming into unnecessary contact with the government in any form.
We hobbled on until dark, when I caught sight of a hut some distance off the trail and forced my tortured feet to carry me to it. It proved to be the most miserable human dwelling I had yet seen, inhabited by a yellow-negro male and female without a possession in the world worth a dollar. There was not a scrap of anything to eat, no light, and not even a roof over most of the house. But casually, during the course of the fixed formalities of greeting, the man mentioned that back at the “office” where Lopez had refused to stop the weekly steer had just been killed! It was the first time since leaving Ciudad Bolívar that there had been a possibility of buying meat. I offered the mulatto a cash reward to go back and get me two bolívares worth, an offer which he accepted with what passes in Venezuela for alacrity, first showing me on the way his “well”—two small holes in the ground on the edge of a morichal. There I sat and poured gallons of water on my aching feet, at the same time drinking my fill. Hobbling back to the hut, I had the woman put on the kettle at once, and the water was hot when the man arrived, strangely enough bringing what was probably the whole forty cents’ worth—a great slab of beef nearly two feet long. Unnecessary delay being painful, I myself cut it up and soon had it stewing. Meanwhile I sent our colored friend to a neighboring hut to buy papelón, which proved to be my old companion chancaca, panela, rapadura, or crude sugar of solid form, in a new disguise. By the time he returned I was drinking beef broth, to the astonishment of all beholders, for these foolish people, who are always on the verge of starvation and ready to eat the most inedible rubbish, boil their beef and then throw away the broth! They seem, too, to prefer their miserable cassava to meat, though in this case the family was still devouring their share of the feast when I turned in at what must have been near midnight of a day that I only then recalled had been Sunday.
The most persistent of roosters, a few feet away from me, began his false report about three and kept it up unbrokenly until daylight really broke. This time we loaded the big new donkey, but the sun was well up before we had found and captured the other two. The old canvas cover of Lopez’ pack showed faintly the words “U. S. Mail,” but this would have meant nothing to him, even had I called attention to it, for geography is a closed subject to the rural Venezuelan. Those to whom I mentioned that I came from the United States were sure to make some such remark as, “Ah, United States of Venezuela?”—evidently thinking those two parts of the same country. Lopez asked me one day, in an unusual fit of curiosity, whether the money he had been using all his life was not minted in my country, because it said “Estados Unidos de Venezuela” on each coin. He was typical of the soul of the common people of that misruled “republic,” harassed by fate, the government, the climate, the difficulty of making the most meager living, and his faint, almost unconscious longing for light, scarcely daring to mention his views on politics even to a footsore foreigner, so dreaded are the tyrants whose names are spoken by this class, if at all, only in whispers. Outwardly many of their manners and opinions are ludicrous, but one comes to learn that these little brown people have their own ego under their comic-opera looks and actions.
At the very next house we stopped for an hour while Lopez bargained for chinchorros, his trade being that of chinchorrero, or buyer of the grass hammocks that serve as beds to most Venezuelans. Vespucci found the Indians of the Orinoco sleeping in the tops of trees, at least in flood time, and named the country “Little Venice.” Their descendants still sleep in tree-tops, though now woven into hammocks. Chinchorros are made of the tender center leaf of the moriche palm, which men and boys climb as material is needed, turning it over to the weavers, who almost invariably are women. It is either a fact or a persistent superstition that the finer grade of hammocks can only be woven by women and in the early morning or late evening when the dew gives the air a proper humidity; so at those hours one may come upon a girl or matron at almost any hut in this region diligently rolling the split palm-leaves into twine against her bare leg, for which there is believed to be no effective substitute. Whether both delusions have not been deliberately nurtured by the men for their own advantage is at least a reasonable question.
The heavier and cheaper grades of hammock, however, can be made under less picturesque conditions, hence are astonishingly low in price. At two neighboring huts Lopez bought a dozen for the equivalent of $7.70, but the sun was high before they had been paid for and loaded. He hoped to sell them in Barcelona on the north coast for about $10, also the recruit donkey for a similar advance over its cost. A few miles beyond we crossed by a narrow pass another great morichal and the River Tigre, where we swam and drank our fill in spite of the prevalence of alligators, for another waterless nine leagues lay before us. In such situations endurance depends mainly on the power of detaching oneself from one’s surroundings, and I found that by picturing to myself in detail the approaching arrival home to which I had so long looked forward, I could banish even raging thirst into the dim background. Thus I managed to plod fully half the distance on my tortured feet before opening my bottle of water. We set the swiftest pace of which we were capable in order to have the ordeal over as soon as possible, but bit by bit the water and then the few small green lemons we had picked up at the last house were consumed, and still the shimmering, withered desert crept up over the horizon. To save my soles from the gridirons of purgatory I could not increase my pace in proportion to my raging thirst. The sun beat down from sheer overhead, began its decline, peered in under my hat-brim, and still the painful, choking, unbroken plodding continued. Lopez judged the hour by his shadow, and I by a toss of the head till the sunlight struck my eyes, a gesture that had become second nature during my long tramp through South America. Yet there was a fascination about traveling with these primitive llaneros, enduring all their hardships, entering bit by bit into their taciturn inner selves, to find them, after all, different, yet strangely like the generality of mankind.
The hammock-buyer in the bosom of his family
Policemen of Barcelona, and a part of the city waterworks