It was a clever bit of forethought—that move of ours to hunt up the men. Had we not done so, we could never have caught the early morning train, for the messenger was slow, and we would have become merely a part of the hot and dependent crowd on the later “special.” It’s better sometimes not to stay where you’re put.
We move along at a good pace among the gardens of La Guayra,—rather sparse gardens they are,—and then we climb to the balconies, and then a turn and we are hiding about the Great Mother’s green petticoats; and anon we pass up to the roofs of La Guayra,—which reach out like a white sombrero over the little people below.
Then the pull begins. Two powerful, stocky, low-built, narrow-gauge mountain engines haul us along with apparently no effort, up into the mountains, up a grade which seems to grow steeper every minute. Our men say that the average grade is over four per cent. I can’t see how it is that men know all these things about grades and percentages. It seems like such a lot of plunder to lie around in the brain. But—about such trifles—men must know and women must ask, and that’s all there is to it.
It is a continuous twisting and turning and winding, seldom on a level stretch; it’s up, up away from the sea from the very start. Now, we are far above the tree-tops of the town, and our white ship out in the harbour lies motionless, and seems far away. We wonder at the courage of the people who would dare so great a feat of road-building, and grow doubly curious to see the city, hidden beyond in the clouds of the mountain.
III.
La Guayra lies just above sea-level. In two hours, we must climb over the Great Mother’s back, going thirty odd miles to reach Caracas, which lies at an elevation over three thousand feet in a valley, only six miles in an air line from La Guayra.
Up, up into the thin vapours, into regions of other trees still higher, whose tops again we pass amongst. The sun is hazy through a translucent veil of mist, and far away, the white horses of the sea dance up against the shore and out of sight, and the white sombrero drops beneath an emerald cloak, and everything but the sky is shut out.
We jump first to one side of the car and then to the other, for the sea-view and for the mountains. We are whirled around quick curves, and all but lose our feet; and some of us—even men—get dizzy looking at the drop below us; and then we cut through the mountain and hurry on up the steep climb until the plucky little engine decides to stop, and we are told that we have reached the summit; and we hurry from the cars and feel the sweet coolness of the mountains, and the actual presence of the Great Mother.
We stand close together on the brink of a chasm and look tremulously into the depths of her great heart; down, down, a thousand feet and more of living, breathing green, into every hue of purple and blue, deepening into black near the far-off valley, and disappearing into azure among the clouds,—silence, shadow, tenderness, sublimity, overspread by the ineffable loveliness of morning.
We are moving again, and now it is down, gradually, for Caracas lies a thousand feet below the summit. We follow along a white highroad, the mountain trail from Caracas to the sea. Now we are on its level; now we leave it. Long trains of pack-mules make a cloud of gray dust against the green, and here and there a red blanket thrown across a burro’s back brings a delicious bit of life and colour into the passing scene.