Lopez bought four dozen more hammocks in Cantaura, and I a bag of food to share with him in return for the privilege of loading it on one of his donkeys, though the favor would have been granted me in any case, for I had gradually found that there was a moderately kind heart beneath the taciturn, part-Indian exterior of the chinchorrero. An older man in the selfsame two-piece cotton garments, peaked hat of coarsest straw, and bare feet thrust into cowhide sandals, had joined us, making our party four men and as many donkeys. We plunged at once into a country quite different from that I had so far seen, becoming involved in a series of foothills which gradually rose higher and higher until the ranges seemed to be climbing pellmell one over another in a vain effort to escape some unseen terror. They were covered with thick woods, and at first the well-marked trail of hard earth promised comfortable, shady going; but soon that other curse of the foot-traveler descended in torrents that almost made the drought of bygone days seem preferable. Pounds of mud clung to every step; the earth grasped the heels of my low shoes as in a clamp, requiring the full force of each leg to set it before the other. I dared not drop behind; luckily, the others could not go much faster than I, their only advantage being that they could wash their bare feet or sandals in any stream without stopping, while I must carry the mud on.
Toward noon the country opened out once more, with fewer woods and lower hills, and we were dry again by the time we finished the day’s toil at a weed-hidden village. The next night’s stopping-place was, I believe, the most horrible in all South America. Two old huts covered with ancient reeds and completely surrounded, inside and out, with every filth of man and beast, were inhabited by a fully white and well formed man, who stumped about on legs completely hidden under many layers of the foulest contamination. This had invaded everything, including the slatternly blond mother and her half-dozen of what seemed beneath the mire to be tow-headed children, the whole family rapidly going blind from some disease resembling ophthalmia. Yet they seemed to have no inkling of their abominations. The man chattered politics as if he might at any moment be called to the presidency and handed me a foul liquid as if it were the finest drinking water. The next day was laborious, though not thirsty, Lopez leading the way along single-file paths and short cuts over hill and dale through dense low woods. Now and then we broke out upon a hot, bare stretch, where my companions sometimes threw themselves face-down to drink liquid mud from some hollow in the ground. During the afternoon the “road” was full of loose rocks of all sizes, which tortured my maltreated feet almost beyond endurance. We reached the mud village of Caripe before sunset, but Lopez had relatives farther on, so we followed the “camino real” and a telegraph wire for several more toilsome, up-and-down miles, the hammock-buyer now and then repeating a cheerful, “We are almost at the door of the house.” Presently we left the main trail and plunged off into the wet, black, silent night, through hilly woods and head-high weeds, through knee-deep mud-holes and past frog-chanting lagoons, to come at last upon two miserable huts swarming with gaunt and savage curs and harboring vociferous, unwashed people without number. They gave me scant greeting, and when I insisted on having something hot to eat for the first time in three days, Lopez explained that my stomach was “delicate.” By admitting this calumny I obtained a soup made of two eggs, after which seven of us men swung our hammocks in the open-pole kitchen. Water was so scarce that I had to wait until all the others were audibly asleep before filching two tiny canfuls from the mouldy kitchen jar to pour on my burning, itching feet and legs.
Being now only four leagues from his native El Pilar, Lopez left his hammocks and asses to be brought in by the others, and saddling the new donkey, which he had reduced in a week from a fine animal to a wreck, and putting on a five-dollar velour sombrero for which he had spent in Ciudad Bolívar his earnings on the trip before he earned them, he rode away through the wet, early morning woods almost faster than I could limp along behind him. But his plan of making a triumphal entry into his native town met with poor success. The trail was so rough and rocky, so up and down and hot and endless, that the animal all but dropped, and Lopez had to get off and drive him. Such was his haste to get home that I should certainly have been left far behind had he not every little while met a friend on a donkey or a horse and paused to give him the limp greeting customary to the region and to exchange the latest local gossip. The invariable term of endearment was “chico,” rather than the “ché” of the southern end of the continent, and to every man he met during this last part of the journey Lopez gave the mild abrazo of rural Venezuelans, who do not shake hands, but stand at arm’s length and touch each other on the shoulder. Finally we got into a pocket of heavily wooded, low hills, everywhere choked with weeds, though there were some cornfields, the ears broken half off and left hanging to ripen. When it appeared at last amid such surroundings, El Pilar proved to be the usual collection of ancient and decrepit mud huts set in a tangle of jungle and weeds. Just at the edge of town Lopez mounted, and with his new velour hat set at a rakish angle and his bare feet armed with cruel spurs, to say nothing of the cudgel in his hand, he forced the gaunt and worn-out donkey to prance into town like an army charger. But again his plans came to grief. For the misused brute, not being accustomed to the roar and hubbub of towns, effectually balked, and for a hot and sweaty half hour the returning hammock-buyer had the ignominious task of beating, pushing, dragging, and cudgeling the animal through the gaping village to his own house. I meanwhile being reduced to the necessity of carrying my own bundle.
During the journey Lopez had never failed to raise his ragged straw hat whenever he passed any of those crude shrines that mark the last resting-place of those of his fellow-travelers who have succumbed to the perils of the llanos trails; and he had been diligent in keeping in constant sight a charm in the form of an embroidered red heart worn about his neck. Now it was evident that he had reached home and that danger was over, for he hung the charm carelessly on the adobe wall, and passed the local cemetery without so much as noticing it, though his parents and grandparents lay buried there. He lived with several sisters and a brother in the usual mud hut opening on a baked mud yard, with an open-pole kitchen in which even stray pigs were not considered out of place; but at least his sisters were quiet and outwardly cleanly, almost attractive, and when Lopez, with a princely gesture, threw a peso down before them and commanded “a huge hot meal,” such as he had learned would win my approval, they obeyed his orders almost with alacrity. Meanwhile I went up into the woods to a stream that had left pools of clear water among rocks, and sitting down with a calabash, poured it over me like a Hindu performing his sacred ablutions at Benares. I was probably more soiled and ragged than I had ever been in a long career of vagabondage, but at least this promised to be the last South American mud village in which I should ever sleep. When I had put on my newly washed pajamas and hobbled back to the house, a great chicken-stew awaited us. Lopez and I made entirely away with it, together with a kind of baked squash and several arepas; and when it casually leaked out that eggs cost one cent each in El Pilar, I produced a bolívar with the request to get me twenty of them, half of which I shared with Lopez, while ordering the rest prepared for supper and breakfast. When, in addition to all this, we did away with a whole watermelon, the wonder of the family and the village was complete. Having taught the hammock-buyer the meaning of a real meal, I assumed for a moment the unaccustomed rôle of missionary and strove to show his relatives why their customary diet, with its miserable coarse cassava and stone-cold arepas, was not conducive to longevity.
“Now I am a dozen years older than Lopez,” I began.
“Impossible!” interrupted his sisters, looking from his face to mine.
“Yet both his father and mother, like the fathers and mothers of many countrymen of Venezuela as young as he, have been dead and gone for years.”
“And yours?” inquired the girls.
“Still quite young and lively, thank you,” I replied; “and my grandfather....”
“What—your grandfather!” cried the astounded family of El Pilar.