CHAPTER XXI.

CROSSING THE LLANOS.

Then

THE order of our march was, first the guide's two donkeys, with provision for the road, knives, needles, cotton, &c.,—and our trunks. came our guide, with his fusil and little travelling bag. Next, my wife, on her favourite donkey, with his two paniers-one containing our little Ninine, and the other our little boy. I walked at their side. The rear was brought up by the donkey, with necessary travelling gear, followed by the two men.

The travelling that night was scarcely pleasant; we were nearly, all of us, observing the taciturnity of strangers. The dullness was enlivened only by an occasional remark or question from my wife addressed to me, but intended to draw our silent guide out of his reticence.

At about four in the morning, two hours after

N

our start, we forded a stream, which the guide told us was the Rio Amana, and then ascended a precipitous bank, which the donkeys, with their load, did very well, with a little assistance from us in the way of pushing them up from behind at the steep places.

We were now on a high plateau, one of the Llanos,* the loca plana of the first Spanish "conquistadores," about 200 feet above the level of

*

Comparatively low transverse ridges, running east and west, divide South America into three great districts. Through the northern district, the Orinoco flows; through the central, the Amazon; and through the southern, the La Plata. The country

on each side of these rivers consists of enormous levels, to which the terms Llanos, Selvas, and Pampas are applied, distinguishing the regions bordering on these mighty streams, in the order in which they have been named.”—MILNER'S Gallery of Nature.

“All around us, the plains seemed to rise to heaven, and this vast and silent desert appeared to our eyes like a sea which is covered with sea-weed, or the algæ of the deep sea. According to the inequality of the mass of vapour floating in the atmosphere, and the alternating temperature of the breezes contending against each other, was the appearance of the horizon; in some places clear and sharply defined, in others wavy, crooked, and, as it were, striped. The earth, there, seemed to mingle with heaven. Through the dry mist, we perceived palm trees in the distance. Stripped of their leaves and their green summits, these stems resembled the masts of a ship, which one descries in the horizon at sea."HUMBOLDT.

the

sea, and covering an area of nearly 300,000 square miles.

"High plains, immense, interminable meads,
And vast savannas, where the wandering eye,
Unfixt, is in a verdant ocean lost."

THOMSON.

The dwellers on these plains, here called Llanos or Mesas (table-land), are the Llaneros, men of the mixed races of European, Negro, and Indian. They are accustomed, from their childhood, to throw the lasso over wild cattle, or hurl the lance at their enemy, when at war; to throw the fiercest and most powerful bull, on foot or on horseback, and to be so much at one with their horses in equestrian feats, as to seem to be the returned Centaurs of the ancients. With strength, hardihood, and an indomitable spirit of independence, they are, nevertheless, the puppets of the ambitious, designing, master spirits of the country, who, by pampering their vanity and prejudices, make them willing and zealous tools in their too frequent internecine wars.

At eleven o'clock that morning we got through the second range of the Santa Barbara mountains,

and halted in the vale on the west bank of the beautiful Mapirito. We camped under a clump of small trees, and while some of us gathered wood, the guide arranged the trunks, paniers, and bundles, to make a comfortable apartment for the mother and children. M. Wilhelm made up a fire, and a little while after we were all satisfying our hunger with the greatest cheerfulness, and with the ease of old acquaintance.

Without shoes or

Our guide was a study. leggings, his trousers reaching only a little below the knees, with no knowledge of anything beyond the limits of a few roads and settlements of his own state of Nueva Andalucia, and the neighbouring one of Barcelona, to which we were journeying, and with no greater riches than his cornuca and paltry town house, his gun, and his little pack of merchandise, for he was a peddler, he yet seriously averred that there was nothing but the want of opportunity, which might yet come, to make him President of the Republic, and thereby as great as the Queen of Great Britain.

He was of a kindly nature; and after seeing

that the animals were all right by tying together two legs, and then setting them to browse within ken on the bank, or under clusters of trees, he would sit down and make toys for the children, such as a wooden knife, an arrow, or a paddle. While thus engaged he would sing to them or tell their mother of incidents that had occurred in that part of the country; of the ravages committed by the Spanish and the Republican armies during the struggle for independence; and he would also tell of smaller bands of freebooters who sprang up during those times of trouble, plundering in the name of Ferdinand of Spain, or the Republic, as the occasion presented itself. He pointed out at no great distance from our camping-ground, on our first day's march, where, in a skirmish with Republicans, the robbers having been defeated, were shot and their heads placed on poles. He possessed a silhouette portrait of General Paez, which he held in great reverence, and was often, as he informed us, in the forced company of those who would have killed him did they know that he held the picture in his possession.