The peep of dawn saw me bidding Lopez farewell—and promising to send him dozens of the many photographs the family had insisted on my taking, or pretending to take, of them. I led the sun by more than an hour into the jungle valley through which a stony and mountainous trail lifted me to a summit, where, across wave after wave of blue wooded hills, appeared the Caribbean, as a signal that I had at last walked South America off the map. Huts were fairly thick among hills that grew ever lower and then less stony, the way several times following the gravelly beds of dry streams, until at last it broke out upon a perfectly level flat country of cactus and dry, thorny bush. Here there was for a long time total silence, except for the wail of the mourning dove, so characteristic a sound in this sort of landscape. Then abruptly, without warning, I emerged upon an absolute desert, bare and sandy looking as the Sahara. Instead of the deep sand I expected, however, the soil proved to be mud-flats, now dried and checkered in the sun, and good smooth going, with a telegraph wire for guide—though a bit of rain would have made it almost impassable. Soon I was surprised to hear the roar of breakers, and when I was high enough to look over a sort of natural sand dike, there lay the whole blue Caribbean, with what I had taken for another range of hills rising out of it in the form of rocky islands—and, confound my luck if, hull-down on the horizon and spitting black smoke scornfully back at me, there was not a steamer racing in full speed in the direction of La Guayra!
The mud-flats alternated now and then with deep sand or patches of thorny bush and cactus, a most miserable setting for what I at last made out to be the church-towers of Barcelona, fifth or sixth city of Venezuela, with some 15,000 apathetic inhabitants. But as if fate would give me one last slap before we parted, an arm of the sea appeared when I was almost inside the city and drove me and the trail miles back into the thirsty bush, scrambling through cactus, springing across mud-holes, forever limping painfully onward. Then at last I emerged upon a cement sidewalk on an otherwise dirty, tumble-down, earth-floored town of flat gridiron formation, inhabited by a ragged and uninteresting population conspicuously Latin-American in all its manifestations, even to striking, upon the appearance of a stranger, an attitude in which to enjoy so rare a sight at ease and to the full as long as he remained visible.
A bread-seller of Caracas
The birthplace of Simón Bolívar of Caracas, the “Washington of South America”
A street in Caracas
The Municipal Theater of Caracas