From sea level to the summit of the range, the railroad is conspicuous for its heavy grade—about four per cent.—its sharp curves, its cuts and tunnels, but above all for the magnificent scenery everywhere visible. From the car window one may look over precipitous cliffs into yawning abysses far below the track on which the train slowly and carefully winds its way. On the beetling rocks above, in the dark and wild gorge below—what a wealth of vegetation, what luxuriance of growth, what a gorgeous display of vari-colored fruit and flower, of delicate fern and majestic palm!
As a feat of engineering the road is quite equal to any of the kind that may be seen in Europe or the United States; but for scenic beauty and splendor it is absolutely unrivaled. On the lofty flanks of the Rockies, and in the deep cañons of the Fraser and Colorado rivers, where the shrill whistle of the locomotive startles the falcon and the eagle, one can have fully gratified one’s sense of the grand and the sublime in nature; but here it is beauty, grandeur, sublimity all combined. And what marvelous perspectives, what delightful exhibitions of color, what superb and ever-changing effects of light and shade—scenes that would be the despair of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, and as difficult to catch on canvas as the glories of the setting sun.
No where else in the wide world can one find such another picture as greets one’s vision when, rising into cloudland, one gets one’s last view of the Caribbean circling the mountain thousands of feet beneath the silent and awe-stricken spectator. It is matchless, unique—like Raphael’s Madonna di San Xysto, impossible to duplicate.
As we reached this point, the sea disclosed itself as a vast mirror resplendent under the aureate glow of the quivering beams of the departing lord of day. Fleecy clouds of every form and hue flitting over sea and land, by a peculiar optical illusion, magnified both objects and distances, and unfolded before the astonished beholder a panorama of constantly varying magnitude and of surpassing loveliness. On the foreground Nature shed her brightest green, and imparted to flower and foliage the flush of the rainbow. Of a truth,
“Never did Ariel’s plume
At golden sunset hover
O’er scenes so full of bloom.”
Away and beyond was the boundless, glimmering sea, ravishing in its thousand tints, and in its harmonious dance of vanishing light and color.
So occupied were we in observing the beauties of the everchanging landscape, that, before we realized it, we were in Caracas. And so momentary was the twilight— a characteristic of the tropics—that the transition from daylight to darkness was almost startling. We found an unexpected compensation, however, in the friendly glow of the electric lights which illumine the street and plazas of Venezuela’s capital.
We spent a month in and about Caracas, finding every hour enjoyable. It is, in many respects, a beautiful city and located near the base of the mountains La Silla, the saddle—from its fancied resemblance to an army saddle—and El Cerro de Avila, in a charming valley from one to three miles wide and about ten miles long. The valley was at one time, seemingly, the bed of a lake, and its soil is, consequently, exceedingly fertile, and admirably adapted to cultivation of the farm and garden produce of both tropical and temperate climates.