Finally, after we had been about three hours in the montaña, the rain continuing all the while without cessation; after we had narrowly escaped being mired several times, or being carried away by several of the impetuous water courses that obstructed our path—there were by actual count more than thirty of them; after a long struggle against the dread that was so greatly depressing our vaqueano, and trying to take an optimistic view of our situation, we had our attention directed to a loud roaring noise immediately in front of us. We knew at once what that meant, and did not need the information then volunteered by our guide, “He aquí el Ocoa, Señores.” That is the Ocoa, Sir.
A few minutes more and we were on its banks. Swollen to an unusual height by the recent heavy rainfalls in the Andes, it was now a raging, roaring mountain torrent that had attained the magnitude of a tumultuous river which swept everything before it. It must have been such a torrent that the poet Schiller had before his mind’s eye when he wrote The Diver, of which the following stanza is a part:—
“And it seethes and roars, it welters and boils,
As when water is showered upon fire;
And skyward the spray agonizingly toils
And flood over flood sweeps higher and higher,
Upheaving, downrolling, tumultuously,
As though the abyss would bring forth a young sea.”
C., who had never witnessed in Trinidad such exhibitions of storm and flood, was in despair. Our peons, finding their worst forebodings an actuality, were distressed and disconsolate. If they could but reach the other side of the river, they would be almost in sight of their homes from which they had been absent for more than a week.
“How long shall we be obliged to wait before we can cross?” someone timorously inquired. “If it does not rain any more,” the reply came, “we may get over to-morrow evening. If there is another aguacero in the mountains, Dios sabe,”—God knows—“how long we may be detained here.” Just then, one of the peons who claimed superior knowledge about the behavior of such rios bravos as the one before us, gave it as his candid opinion, that, even if there were no further rain, it would be quite impossible to effect a passage inside of three days.