[17] In the quasi-suburb, known as morichales, from the number of moriche palms found there, the homes of the well-to-do people are not unlike those we so much admired in Trinidad. Some of them are delightful arbors, surrounded by gardens filled with the rarest shrubs and blooms. Here truly, in the language of Pliny, flowers are the joy of trees, and they vie with one another in the brilliance of their colors, and in the exuberance of their growth. [↑]
CHAPTER IV
IN MID-ORINOQUIA
At last we were ready to start on our long journey up the Orinoco and the Meta, and then across the llanos of Eastern Colombia, and the Cordilleras to far-off Bogotá. For several days the swarthy stevedores of Ciudad Bolivar had been busy in transferring to our little steamer the freight that had here been accumulating for her during the preceding six months.
For several days, too, our friends and acquaintances had been endeavoring to dissuade us from what one and all pronounced a rash and dangerous undertaking. All meant well, but all were prophets of ill. No one, we were assured, had ever gone to Bogotá by the route we purposed taking,[1] and we were solemnly warned time and again that we were surely risking our health if not exposing our lives. Everything, it was averred, was against the successful termination of our journey, and it would be a miracle if we ever reached Bogotá alive.
First of all, there were the steaming, miasmatic exhalations in the Orinoco and Meta valleys, from which they were never free, and the ever present danger of yellow fever and other malignant diseases. Even people who were thoroughly acclimated incurred the greatest risk in traveling through this pestiferous, germ-laden atmosphere. How much more then should we, who had so recently come from the chilly north, be exposed, if we still persisted in our foolhardy venture? And then, if we fell sick, as we surely must, we should be in a trackless wilderness, among savages, and far away from medical aid of any kind.
Then there was the torrid climate to take into account. By reason of the intense heat, it would be impossible to travel by day. We should then perforce be obliged to travel by night. And this implied new dangers—dangers of straying from a poorly defined trail, or of falling into ravines, or quagmires, and dangers from wild animals of all kinds, with which the forests and plains were always infested. There was the jaguar, always prowling about, seeking whom he might devour; the labairi and boaquira, serpents whose envenomed fangs bring certain death to their victims, and the dread boa that was pictured as hanging in untold numbers from the branches of the trees in the forests through which we should pass.
A torrid climate, a reeky, malarial atmosphere, a region infested with venomous serpents—all this was bad enough, but this was far from being the sum total of the pests and plagues we should encounter.
There was that ever-present pest—whose name is not legion, but billion—on which travelers in South America have exhausted their supply of adjectives in the vain attempt adequately to express their sentiments. I refer to what the Spaniard has so aptly called the plaga—the plague—the cloud of mosquitoes of many species that constantly torment the traveler, and give him no rest night or day. We had read what various writers on the equinoctial regions had to say of the murderous onslaughts of the mosquito from the time of the early missionaries down to our own, and such reading was far from calculated to reassure one who was about to form a more intimate acquaintance of the plaga in question.[2]