“No nation, no generous Lafayette,” he cried, “has come to their aid; alone and without help they have sustained their glorious cause, trusting to its justice, and with the assistance only of their bravery, their deserts, and their Andes—and one man, Simon Bolivar, the Washington of South America.”
VIEW OF LA GUAYRA
And you can imagine the six hundred Americans jumping to their feet and cheering the name of the young soldier, and the French marquis eagerly asking that he might be the one to send him some token of their sympathy and admiration. Lafayette forwarded the portrait of Washington to Bolivar, who valued it so highly that the people who loved him valued the man he worshipped; and to-day you will see in Caracas streets and squares and houses named after Washington, and portraits of Washington crossing the Delaware, and Washington on horseback, and Washington at Mount Vernon, hanging in almost every shop and café in the capital. And the next time you ride in Central Park you might turn your bicycle, or tell the man on the box to turn the horses, into that little curtain of trees, and around the hill where the odd-looking statue stands, and see if you cannot feel some sort of sympathy and pay some tribute to this young man who loved like a hero, and who fought like a hero, with the fierceness of the tropical sun above him, and whose inspiration was the calm, grave parent of your own country.
Bolivar’s country is the republic of South America that stands nearest to New York, and when people come to know more concerning it, I am sure they will take to visiting it and its capital, the “Paris of South America,” in the winter months, as they now go to southern Europe or to the Mediterranean.
There are many reasons for their doing so. In the first place, it can be reached in less than six days, and it is the only part of South America to which one can go without first crossing the Isthmus of Panama and then taking a long trip down the western coast, or sailing for nearly a month along the eastern coast; and it is a wonderfully beautiful country, and its cities of Caracas and Valencia are typical of the best South-American cities. When you have seen them you have an intelligent idea of what the others are like; and when you read about revolutions in Rio Janeiro, or Valparaiso, or Buenos Ayres, you will have in your mind’s eye the background for all of these dramatic uprisings, and you will feel superior to other people who do not know that the republic of Venezuela is larger than France, Spain, and Portugal together, and that the inhabitants of this great territory are less in number than those of New York city.
THE RAILROAD UP THE MOUNTAIN
La Guayra is the chief seaport of Venezuela. It lies at the edge of a chain of great mountains, where they come down to wet their feet in the ocean, and Caracas, the capital, is stowed away three thousand feet higher up behind these mountains, and could only be bombarded in time of war by shells that would rise like rockets and drop on the other side of the mountains, and so cover a distance quite nine miles away from the vessel that fired them. Above La Guayra, on the hill, is a little fortress which was once the residence of the Spanish governor when Venezuela was a colony of Spain. It is of interest now chiefly because Charles Kingsley describes it in Westward Ho! as the fortress in which the Rose of Devon was imprisoned. Past this fortress, and up over the mountains to the capital, are a mule-trail and an ancient wagon-road and a modern railway.
It is a very remarkable railroad; its tracks cling to the perpendicular surface of the mountain like the tiny tendrils of a vine on a stone-wall, and the trains creep and crawl along the edge of its precipices, or twist themselves into the shape of a horseshoe magnet, so that the engineer on the locomotive can look directly across a bottomless chasm into the windows of the last car. The view from this train, while it pants and puffs on its way to the capital, is the most beautiful combination of sea and plain and mountain that I have ever seen. There are higher mountains and more beautiful, perhaps, but they run into a brown prairie or into a green plain; and there are as beautiful views of the ocean, only you have to see them from the level of the ocean itself, or from a chalk-cliff with the downs behind you and the white sand at your feet. But nowhere else in the world have I seen such magnificent and noble mountains running into so beautiful and green a plain, and beyond that the great blue stretches of the sea. When you look down from the car-platform you see first, stretching three thousand feet below you, the great green ribs of the mountain and its valleys and waterways leading into a plain covered with thousands and thousands of royal palms, set so far apart that you can distinguish every broad leaf and the full length of the white trunk. Among these are the red-roofed and yellow villages, and beyond them again the white line of breakers disappearing and reappearing against the blue as though some one were wiping out a chalk-line and drawing it in again, and then the great ocean weltering in the heat and stretching as far as the eye can see, and touching a sky so like it in color that the two are joined in a curtain of blue on which the ships seem to lie flat, like painted pictures on a wall.