Unfortunately for us, we were often obliged to listen to sounds that were not so agreeable as those of the flautero or campanero. These were the raucous, discordant, never-ending noises produced by frogs and toads. In Orocué they always began their cacophonous serenade at nightfall, and kept it up uninterruptedly until the following morning. I could then realize that Padre Rivero had good cause for regarding them as among the greatest nuisances with which he had to contend. Their confused, strident notes—base, tenor, contralto, soprano—kept up the entire night were, he assures us, enough to split one’s head. Some of these amphibians we heard at Orocué were on the opposite side of the river from us, more than half a mile distant. They were in very truth what Lowell has so well characterized as
“Old croakers, deacons of the mire,
That led the deep batrachian choir.”
The wonderful depth and fertility of the dark, loamy soil in the valley of the Meta was ever a source of wonder to us. Along the river banks it usually formed a layer of four or five feet, and not infrequently seven or eight feet. And the vegetation was everywhere an evidence of this fertility. At Platanales, a conuco at which we spent a night, we saw a grove of several acres of the largest and most prolific bananas and plantains we had ever encountered anywhere. At another conuco, farther up the river, where we stopped for breakfast, we saw several acres of corn that was rapidly maturing. And what corn! Never did I in Kansas or Nebraska see such ample stalks or so large ears and grains. It was a revelation to us, and exhibited in a most striking manner the wonderful, future possibilities of this marvelously fertile, yet unknown land.
Near every dwelling, however humble, along the Meta, we observed a large cross made of tastefully and often artistically plaited palm leaves. The material was yet quite fresh and the crosses had evidently been erected only a few days before we passed by. In design and workmanship they reminded us of those seen in parts of Italy on Palm Sunday. On inquiry, we found that they had been erected on the third of May, the feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross.
“Why is this cross placed here?” I asked of an Indian woman, while she was preparing our desayuno. “Para que no nos pegue el chubasco,”—in order that the chubasco—wind squall—may not strike us, she replied without hesitation. I asked many others at divers places the same question and invariably received a similar reply.
These poor people were not able to erect the beautiful shrines one so frequently sees in the Catholic countries of Europe, and so their simple faith found expression in these palm-leaf crosses, on which they had evidently put their best and most careful work, of which they often seemed justly proud.
On passing by a particularly large and beautiful cross of this kind my mind reverted to a shrine near the lighthouse of Savona, an ancient town near Genoa. Here there is a statue of the Madonna, twelve feet high, under which are inscribed two Sapphic verses, expressing in rhythmic numbers the same idea that was uppermost in the mind of the good Indian woman when she braided and placed in position this symbol of redemption. The verses were composed by Gabriello Chiabrera, “the prince of Italian lyric poets,” who was a native of Savona. They are remarkable in that they are both “good Latin and choice Italian,” and have the same meaning in both languages. They read as follows:
“In mare irato, in subita procella,